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Dr. Card's article provides useful and clear standards for determining what good measurement is, identifies important problems in the measurement of constructs important to character education, and provides clear guidance about measurement development. In this article, I raise 4 points that build on Dr. Card's work. First, advancing assessment in character education requires a vigorous pursuit of conceptual clarity. Second, the field will benefit from efforts specifically to create assessments designed for practice, and those efforts should include consideration of how assessment data are interpreted and used. Third, I highlight the importance in practice of being clear about the purposes for assessing character. And finally, I argue that the method of assessment is a critical but underappreciated consideration, because different methods of assessment are suited to measuring different dimensions of character. The article provides examples from the field of social and emotional learning that are relevant to the adjacent field of character education.
Few Spanish language tools are available for assessing important social-emotional learning (SEL) skills. The present study presents evidence of the psychometric properties of a Spanish-language version of SELweb (SELweb-S), a web-based system for assessing children's ability to recognize others' emotions and perspectives, solve social problems, and engage in self-control. With a sample of 524 students in Grades K to 3, we examined the reliability and validity of SELweb-S. This study provided evidence that (a) individual assessment modules exhibited moderate to high internal consistency and moderate 6-month temporal stability, (b) composite assessment scores exhibited high reliability, (c) assessment module scores fit a theoretically coherent factor structure, and (d) performance on SELweb-S assessment modules was positively related to teacher-reported SEL skills. Findings are discussed in terms of the importance of direct assessments of SEL skills in languages other than English. In addition, we highlight the importance of abiding by rigorous recommendations in the literature for the translation and cultural adaptation of assessments. (PsycINFO Database Record
Few Spanish language tools are available for assessing important social-emotional learning (SEL) skills. The present study presents evidence of the psychometric properties of a Spanish-language version of SELweb (SELweb-S), a web-based system for assessing children's ability to recognize others' emotions and perspectives, solve social problems, and engage in self-control. With a sample of 524 students in Grades K to 3, we examined the reliability and validity of SELweb-S. This study provided evidence that (a) individual assessment modules exhibited moderate to high internal consistency and moderate 6-month temporal stability, (b) composite assessment scores exhibited high reliability, (c) assessment module scores fit a theoretically coherent factor structure, and (d) performance on SELweb-S assessment modules was positively related to teacher-reported SEL skills. Findings are discussed in terms of the importance of direct assessments of SEL skills in languages other than English. In addition, we highlight the importance of abiding by rigorous recommendations in the literature for the translation and cultural adaptation of assessments. (PsycINFO Database Record
In the push to boost young people's social and emotional learning (SEL), assessment has lagged behind policy and practice. We have few usable, feasible, and scalable tools to assess children's SEL. And without good assessments, teachers, administrators, parents, and policymakers can't get the data they need to make informed decisions about SEL. Some existing SEL assessments, writes Clark McKown, are appropriate for some purposes, such as keeping teachers abreast of their students' progress or evaluating SEL interventions. But too few high-quality SEL assessments are able to serve a growing range of purposes--from formative assessment to accountability, and from prekindergarten through high school. McKown recommends proceeding along two paths. First, he writes, educators should become familiar with existing SEL assessments so that they can learn their appropriate uses and limits in a low-stakes context. At the same, we need to invest money and talent to create assessment systems that can be used to meet important assessment goals at all grade levels. McKown walks us through definitions of SEL, identifying three broad areas of SEL skills-- thinking, behavior, and self-control. Each area encompasses skills that are associated with important life and academic outcomes, that are feasible to assess, and that can be influenced by children's experiences. Such meaningful, measurable, and malleable skills, McKown argues, should form the basis of SEL assessments. The next generation of SEL assessments should follow six principles, he concludes. First, assessments should meet the highest ethical and scientific standards. Second, developers should design SEL assessment systems specifically for educational use. Third, assessments should measure dimensions of SEL that span the three categories of thinking, behavioral, and self-control skills. Fourth, assessment methods should be matched to what's being measured. Fifth, assessments should be developmentally appropriate--in other words, children of different ages will need different sorts of assessments. Last, to discourage inappropriate uses, developers should clearly specify the intended purpose of any SEL assessment system, beginning from the design stage.
Social-emotional learning (SEL) skill includes the ability to encode, interpret, and reason about social and emotional information. In two related studies, we examined the relationship between children's SEL skill, their ability to regulate their own behavior, and the competence of their social interactions. Study 1 included 158 typically developing children ages 4 to 14 years. Study 2 included 126 clinic-referred children ages 5 to 17 years. Findings from both studies supported the conclusion that SEL skill includes three broad factors: awareness of nonverbal cues; the ability to interpret social meaning through theory of mind, empathy, and pragmatic language; and the ability to reason about social problems. Furthermore, the better children perform on measures of SEL skill and the more their parents and teachers report that children can regulate their behavior, the more competent their social interactions.