Development and Implementation of Student Social-Emotional Surveys in the CORE Districts

States and school districts across the U.S. are seeking to expand their definition of student success to include social-emotional learning. The CORE Districts, a collaborative of California districts that has developed a system of school accountability and continuous improvement that includes measures of social-emotional skills based on student self-reports, exemplify this trend.

This case study provides an overview of CORE's School Quality Improvement System, which was implemented in the 2015–16 school year across six districts serving roughly one million students. It describes how four social-emotional competencies—growth mindset, self-efficacy, self-management, and social awareness—were selected for assessment; the process for curating and piloting assessments of students' social-emotional skills; and reliability and validity evidence from a 2015 field test of social-emotional measures based on self-reports from nearly 400,000 students.

The study concludes with lessons from the development of CORE's system for other next-generation accountability and continuous improvement efforts.

This article was originally published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology by Elsevier and ScienceDirect.