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While basic proficiency in mathematics, reading, and writing is essential, educators and parents alike would more likely list characteristics like perseverance, self-control, creativity, time management, leadership, conscientiousness, and being an effective collaborator when considering what is most important for success in school, work, and life. These characteristics are often dubbed "social-emotional learning (SEL) competencies," "noncognitive skills," "soft skills," or "21st century skills" in the literature. Although near universal at the preschool level, state adoption by states of freestanding K-12 standards targeting noncognitive skills remains a work in progress. Any effort at implementing state SEL standards must be accompanied by reliable, valid, and conceptually aligned mechanisms for determining the extent to which students and schools have met the standards. This article offers three general recommendations for consideration. First, because noncognitive skills tend to be complex and multifaceted, when feasible, multiple types of assessment should be targeted at each construct of interest; second, assessments should be standardized to ensure students and teachers are encountering comparable stimuli across school contexts; and third, that State Boards of Education and state education agencies work with experts in the field to both build noncognitive assessments and thoroughly research their measurement characteristics, validity, and fairness.
In this report, we describe the initial stages of a crosscutting research effort to characterize literature reviewed across 8 different projects--each with objectives aligned toward improving student engagement in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) fields. These projects sought to identify malleable factors (e.g., motivation, persistence) that could potentially be fostered to improve achievement motivation and build participation among historically underrepresented learners in STEAM pathways. Focusing on both the extent to which different broad and facet-level constructs are both discussed and assessed in a diverse pool of literature, we developed a standardized reporting structure and catalogued detailed information on 236 unique references. We found that, as a proportion of the number of times constructs in the STEAM, expectancy value (EV) theory, and social emotional learning (SEL) spaces were discussed in the reviewed literature, they were assessed relatively infrequently. We also found high levels of overlap in the literature across the above 3 focal areas, highlighting both the need to document new assessments designed to support STEAM engagement and an opportunity to use them to evaluate expectancy value theory as a holistic model.