Foster youth have attended schools for decades, but with the development of the local control funding formula (LCFF) and Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP), they are now a group of students receiving the publicity and acknowledgment needed to improve their academic and social success. This study brings to light the importance of…

The aim of this paper is to describe a school-based universal intervention (the Tilly's Life Center "I Am Me" program) to promote emotional competence and social-emotional skills in adolescents. We present results of a mixed-methods program evaluation conducted in public schools in Southern California. In Study 1, sixteen students…

In addition to excelling in subjects such as science, math, arts, and social studies, students must also develop skills like resiliency, adaptability, and collaboration in order to truly succeed in the world. But how do schools effectively measure those skills when they so often rely on standardized assessments? This article provides a thorough…

Prior work has shown that students' reports of their levels of social-emotional skills predict achievement levels and gains, but we have little evidence on whether within-student changes in student reports of social-emotional skills are predictive of changes in theoretically related academic and behavioral outcomes. We use large-scale data from…

Prior work has shown that levels of self-reported student social-emotional learning (SEL) predict student achievement levels--as well as student achievement gains--but little has been done to understand if within-student changes in student reports of SEL are predictive of changes in theoretically related academic and behavioral outcomes. We use…

Education researchers use surveys widely. Yet, critics question respondents' ability to provide high-quality responses. As schools increasingly use student surveys to drive policymaking, respondents' (lack of) motivation to provide quality responses may threaten the wisdom of using surveys for data-based decision-making. To better understand…

Signed into law on December 10, 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) presents education leaders with a unique opportunity to expand the definition of student success. Compared to the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, ESSA empowers states to make more of the critical decisions related to accountability, school improvement, education spending,…

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…

For years, student test scores drove much of the conversation about school quality and student learning. But new state plans under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) show that policymakers are using a broader set of measures to assess school quality. In addition to math and reading performance, many states will also look at core subjects such…

As educational practitioners and policymakers expand the range of student outcomes they assess, student perception surveys--particularly those targeting social-emotional learning--have grown in popularity. Despite excitement around the potential for measuring a wider array of important student outcomes, concerns about the validity of the…

Measures of school-level growth in student outcomes are common tools used to assess the impacts of schools. The vast majority of these measures are based on standardized tests, even though emerging evidence demonstrates the importance of social-emotional skills (SEL). This paper uses the first large-scale panel surveys of students on SEL to…

Outdoor adventure-based experiences allow students to engage in physical activities and process learning tasks within a novel, open environment that is unlike any classroom. Past outdoor adventure-based research has indicated two primary participant outcomes: intrapersonal and interpersonal relationship skills or IIRS (Moore & Russell, 2002).…

What do K-12 schools need to do to prepare their students for adult success? This was the question that originally catalyzed the standards-and-accountability movement some 30 years ago, though it seems somehow to have gotten lost. Today the question merits revisiting, because addressing it makes a strong case for taking an integrated approach to…

Existing research on self-management skills shows that measures of self-management predict student success. However, these conclusions are based on small samples or narrowly defined self-management measures. Using a rich longitudinal dataset of 221,840 fourth through seventh grade students, this paper describes self-management gaps across student…

This study examined the perspectives of professionals and parents on part-time inclusive preschool Head Start programs that included both children with and without disabilities. The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to examine parent and teacher perspectives of inclusion on the developmental outcomes of all children and (b) to investigate…