Background: The transition from primary to secondary school presents a challenging developmental milestone which often marks a decline in academic performance. Social-emotional skills are recognized as fundamental to academic success but longitudinal research is needed to determine the extent of their association over this transition period. Aim:…

In this study, a valid and reliable scale was developed to measure parents' perceptions of their children's social development in physical education classes. In the first part of the research, the relevant literature reviewed and student-parent interviews were held. As a result of the data obtained from the interviews, a 30-item draft scale was…

The aim of this exploratory study was to examine fourth to eighth graders' conceptualizations of kindness at school (i.e., their definition of kindness, an example of an act of kindness they have done, who they see as the most salient adult agent of kindness, and which location they deem that kindness happens most). To date, kindness research has…

In this article, Sanders-Bustle recounts what happened when university art education students created socially engaged art (SEA), "Project Unway" and "Project Unity," in the hallways of a middle school. The events represented in this article stem from activities that took place in a secondary art education curriculum course…

This study examined the development of social skills across five measurement points from 4th through 7th grade, and the influence of child gender and school-related factors on the level and growth of social skills, in a large sample of normally developing children in Norway (N = 2,076). On average, children's social skills scores increased…

Learners from underserved backgrounds tend to show lower levels of college readiness (ACT, 2016a; ACT, 2018). In part to address these disparities, the authors investigated growth in social and emotional (SE) skills in a cohort of largely Hispanic, high-poverty students who participated in GEAR UP. GEAR UP is a discretionary federal grant program…

Adolescence is a developmental period when youth are increasingly likely to turn to their peers for support, and it is also a time of increased salience and development of ethnic-racial identity (ERI). Ethnic-racial centrality, a dimension of ERI, could be a predictor in the development of peer support, as youth with a stronger self-concept on the…

Most U.S. classrooms serve students with various linguistic and academic needs. Tier-I universal approaches support English language learners (ELLs) without segregating them into a different track and thereby constraining future learning opportunities. The current study examines whether Word Generation (WG), a Tier-I discussion-based program…

A multisite cluster-randomized trial (by school) was conducted to examine the effects of a combined mental health literacy and dialectical behavior therapy skills program implemented by teachers on three protective factors related to social and emotional well-being. The sample of eight schools that were randomly assigned to intervention included…

Decades of research have shown that exclusionary discipline practices are not only ineffective for changing student behavior, they lead to worse social, behavioral, and academic outcomes for students. This article explores the findings from a pilot study of the "Inclusive Skill-Building Learning Approach" (ISLA), an instructional…

The present paper examines if developmental pathways for students at risk for academic failure can be improved through social and emotional learning (SEL). Specifically, we test this hypothesis by accounting for shifts in student engagement, a highly studied and malleable construct often inclusive of SEL interventions, as the pathway by which to…

The interactions of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) in predicting social and emotional (SE) skills was examined for 81,950 6th-8th graders. At low levels of SES, White students tended to have the lower SE scores. However, as SES increased, they tended to have higher scores relative to minority groups. Across SES levels, Asian…

Measures of school-level growth in student outcomes are common tools for assessing the impacts of schools. The vast majority of these measures use standardized tests as the outcome of interest, even though emerging evidence demonstrates the importance of social-emotional learning (SEL). In this article, we present results from using the first…

As Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) expands to focus on adolescent populations, the broadly accepted theoretical framework put forth by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) should be empirically tested for measurement utility. Using longitudinal data from the 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development, we first…

Researchers attempting to show that music has positive effects on children need to understand and control for preexisting differences between those who do and do not select into musical participation in the first place. Within a large-scale, communitywide, prospective, longitudinal study of predominantly low-income, ethnically diverse students (N…