Freedom School Partners is a six-week summer program that has served the Charlotte, NC area since 2004. The purpose of this report is to present the external evaluation and findings of the six-week program in the summer of 2022. This evaluation is a joint effort between the Centers for Adolescent Literacies (CAL) and the Center for Educational…

The challenges facing adolescents today are greater than ever. It is imperative that students have the social and emotional skills to help them succeed. Mindfulness helps support social, emotional, and academic learning as it assists children in becoming more self-aware and builds self-regulation. Mindfulness is about being present within yourself…

The studies in this special series examine the effectiveness of direct behavior ratings (DBRs) for use as a progress monitoring tool. In this article, we comment on the findings of the studies in the context of the broader school-based assessment movement and discuss areas for future inquiry within this line of research.

While it can be tempting to embrace popular new ideas and practices in education, it is also important to be aware of their flaws or challenges. By examining the downsides of social-emotional learning strategies, the authors of this article argue that one can actually improve and strengthen them. After researching SEL strategies in the Ontario,…

Social-emotional learning refers to the beliefs, attitudes, personality traits, and behaviors that students need to succeed in school and life. Our study looks closely at ten "outlier schools" in California's CORE districts whose students report strong social-emotional learning outcomes compared to other, similar middle schools. This…

A large proportion of students with disabilities (SWD) have social skills deficits that make it difficult for them to succeed in school, work, and life. This quantitative, quasi-experimental, non-equivalent, pretest-posttest, control group study was designed to explore whether SWD can better transfer their learned social skills to natural…

This paper discusses how for 15 years mandated high-stakes testing took precedence as the prominent measure of student success. An unintentional consequence of this time was that social-emotional competencies were overlooked. Most recently, the Kansas Department of Education (KSDE) has developed and implemented an accreditation model that is based…

This article focuses on seven interacting research-informed domains. These domains are grounded in the research literature and have been applied in real world contexts to provide insight into, and an analytical tool for, meeting social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs within educational settings. Practitioner researchers applied the…

The current meta-analysis comprehensively reviewed group-design studies of interventions designed to improve ASD caregiver psychosocial outcomes and explored potential moderators of effectiveness. Forty-one unique studies targeting 1771 caregivers met inclusion criteria. Overall, the interventions had a small positive effect in improving…

The present study seeks to reveal the impact Emotional Literacy Training (ELT) that lasted for two months, on students' emotional intelligence performance. The study was designed as a quasi-experimental research. The experimental group consisted of 16 students, while 12 students were assigned to control group. Data in pre-test and post-test were…

The concept of 'agency' is regularly put forward as an analytic tool to help understand, evaluate and act upon places around the world, through social development policies and programmes ostensibly designed to support or increase children's agency. This article reflects on empirical research into children's agency spanning a range of international…

An elementary school counseling department used data-informed practices in an effort to provide more effective school counseling services. This article provides a summary and evaluation of a girls' relational aggression small group in an elementary setting. Results indicated that integrating friendship, conflict resolution, and self-affirmation…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to explore the relationship between elementary school teachers' perception of emotional intelligence and their beliefs towards Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). Teacher participants completed two self-report surveys: the Assessing Emotion Scale to measure perceived emotional intelligence and the Social…

The aim of this paper is to highlight the benefits brought about by a learning-through-the-arts project aimed at creating links between the cultural heritage of students from diverse backgrounds and the fundamental aims of school instruction. Guided by a naturalistic research strategy and the principles of teacher action research, the data was…

Current science elective courses in Chinese high schools overemphasize subject knowledge, lack course resources, and apply a single instruction methodology. This study attempts to reform high school elective chemistry courses and aims to promote chemical science literacy in students. It takes the example of the development and practice of elective…