This technical manual provides an overview of the Mosaic™ by ACT®: Social Emotional Learning Screener. The Mosaic by ACT: Social Emotional Learning Screener (hereafter referred to as the Screener) assesses the social emotional skills of students in elementary school (Grades 3-5), middle school (Grades 6-8), and high school (Grades 9-12). Each…

The Social and Emotional Learning Program Quality Assessment (SEL PQA) is an efficient and effective, research-validated observational tool for assessing adult youth leader practices that support social and emotional learning. Intended to be used for programs serving young people in grades K-12, the instrument builds on the research-validated…

One of the challenges of developing assessments for young language learners is the shortage of evidence-based information about such assessments for languages other than English. In light of this situation, this paper discusses the development of an assessment for young languages learners in the context of Japanese as a second language (JSL). In…

This research brief highlights findings from the technical report (published separately). Student-level analyses were conducted with the SEL Skills Survey and the Student Climate Survey to determine if a single measure of students' SEL skill acquisition and perceptions of school climate is possible. [For the Technical Report, see ED629195.]

Learning environment studies acknowledge that learning takes place within the social realm and that social conditions contribute to the quality of both learning and experience. This can be said to be especially true for environmental learning programs. To access information about students' perceptions of their learning environment, a robust…

The Policy and the Higher Literacies project reviewed state and local "thoughtfulness" mandates, interviewed appropriate administrators, and visited schools and classrooms boasting higher literacy activities. While most interviewees believed in commercial test validity, those engaged in higher literacy activities largely ignored such…

The development of a new instrument, the Statements About Schools Inventory (SAS) is described. The SAS measures the extent to which high schools meet the needs of their students for a safe, stable environment (security scale), for interpersonal relationships (social scale), for success and achievement (esteem scale), and for personal growth (self…

Evaluates the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in the visual arts, discussing issues such as the formulation of performance expectations and reporting procedures. States that, when exploring the scores, the context within which the arts are taught must be considered. Asserts that educational improvement requires changes in the…

The computer-supported Project Work classroom learning environment discussed in this paper represents a paradigm shift from teacher-centered to student-centered teaching and learning in Singapore schools. Besides the face-to-face weekly lessons in existing Project Work classrooms, the students engaged in computer-supported online forum…

Quality measures were originally developed for research aimed at describing the settings that children spend time in and identifying the characteristics of these environments that contribute to children's development. They were also developed to guide improvements in practice. Increasingly, however, measures of quality are being used for further…