Background: Optimistic thinking is a facet of social-emotional learning linked to better mental health and problem-solving in children; however, few educational tools exist to improve this important aspect of self-awareness. Objective: To examine the effectiveness of an optimistic thinking tool with diverse students in an elementary school…

Education Technology (EdTech) companies are deploying emotional AI to quantify social and emotional learning. Focusing on facial coding emotional AI that uses computer vision and algorithms to see, recognise, categorise and learn about facial expressions of emotion, this paper evaluates nascent usage of these technologies in education. To do this,…

Social and emotional learning (SEL) has proven to be an effective conduit to improved attendance scores, grades, and graduation rates; to adaptive behaviors and gainful employment in adulthood; and to a wide variety of other measurable factors spanning the spectrum of human adaptiveness and wellness (Aspen Institute, 2018). Although SEL has been…

Research increasingly acknowledges the importance of high quality interactions that support and extend children's thinking. Few measurement tools currently exist, however, to capture this specific aspect of process quality. The Sustained Shared Thinking and Emotional Wellbeing (SSTEW) scale was developed to assess interactional quality in early…

Brentwood School is an independent K-12 coed day school with two campuses, located four blocks apart, in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Brentwood's West Campus (Brentwood Lower School) includes grades K-5 with 266 students. It has a student/teacher ratio of 7:1 in kindergarten and 11:1 in first through fifth grade and is 39% students…

Previous research has suggested that multiple factors beyond acceptability alone (e.g., feasibility, external supports) may interact to determine whether consumers will use an intervention or assessment in practice. The Usage Rating Profile for Supporting Students' Behavioral Needs (URP-NEEDS) was developed in order to provide a simultaneous…

Shifting federal educational priorities and increased funding for pre-K means that more school counselors are interacting with and supporting children before kindergarten age in public school settings. One potential area of focus for school counseling with young students is executive function (EF), including emotional and behavioral regulation,…

In a prior study (Millett & Kevelson, 2018a), we demonstrated that college access program participants have positive views of the extent to which the program supports the development of their social and emotional skills and related college help-seeking behaviors in college. In this follow-up study, we explore the extent to which participant…

This meta-analysis summarized the effects of universal and targeted social and emotional learning (SEL) interventions in 48 studies on the development of social and emotional skills and the reduction of problem behaviors in 15,498 preschool students. For universal SEL interventions delivered to all students, a random-effects model with 33 primary…

Calls for innovation in education often focus on the need to prepare students for the future. Ensuring that we are supporting their empathy for others is an often overlooked, but critical, aspect of that preparation.

Recent decades have seen a rise in mental health problems among children and adolescents. Despite a proliferation of studies describing effective school-based mental health programs, reviews of current research in this field suggest a strong lack of consensus concerning the definition of school mental health and its constructs. In the present…

The present study reports associations between features of directly observed classroom processes and school readiness skills across the academic year for 1498 children enrolled in publicly funded pre-K programs in a large and diverse county. In models adjusting for a range of child and family covariates, evidence was detected for the separate, and…

Audiobook listenership is growing with the increasing availability of devices, platforms and apps offering an ever-wider range of high quality titles. This literature review provides an overview of research exploring the role of audiobooks in supporting children's literacy both at home and in the classroom. It focuses on how positive engagement…

To address issues of racial disparities in the US and effect lasting social changes, it is essential for members of privileged groups to learn about the experiences of marginalized individuals and groups. However, this kind of empathic engagement around social justice issues is often avoided by privileged group members due to the potentially high…

Social and emotional learning is a young field, but a very old concept. The idea that children require explicit instruction in social-emotional capacities is present in the writings of philosophers as far back as Plato, and partly constitutes the roots of the "whole-child development" and "developmentally appropriate practice"…