South Australian Well-being and Engagement Collection (WEC)

Product or Programme · All products and programmes
Evidence · 5 claims (5 for) · 1 study (1 associational), q2 · 1 of 1 report an effect size · 5 claims rest on one study

Description

The WEC is an annual student survey administered by the South Australian Department for Education to measure emotional well-being, school engagement, learning readiness, and health and well-being in public-school students in Years 4–12.

Components

• South Australian Well-being and Engagement Collection (WEC) survey and derived indexes: The WEC is an annual system-wide survey administered by the South Australian Department for Education each March to all public schools, covering students in Years 4–12, with over 900,000 observations since 2016. "The WEC survey consists of four constructs: 1) emotional well-being, 2) engagement with school, 3) learning readiness, and 4) health and well -being", formed from approximately 230 individual questions. The study created four indexes from three constructs plus a combined index, linked to census data and NAPLAN/PAT outcomes. (Marrone et al. (2024))

Claims

• Learning readiness is the WEC component most strongly associated with academic outcomes (0.1–0.15 SD) [+W]
• The relationship between the WEC index and academic achievement is stable across student year levels and census years, with no meaningful interaction effects [+W]
• WEC index effects on academic outcomes are more pronounced for male students, with the well-being effect on literacy absent for females [+W]
• The overall WEC well-being index has a weak positive association with academic outcomes, with effect sizes no larger than 0.1 SD [+W]
• The emotional well-being index has the least predictive power on academic outcomes, with effect sizes in the hundredth-of-a-SD range [+W]

Related Products and Programmes

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Key Sources

• Marrone, Lam, Barthakur, Brinkman, Dawson, & Gabriel. (2024). The Relationship between Well-being and Academic Achievement: A Comprehensive Cross-Sectional Analysis of System Wide Data from 2016–2019. Journal of Learning Analytics, 11(3). https://doi.org/10.18608/jla.2024.8357

Page metadata

Field	Value
type	product
id	south-australian-well-being-and-engagement-collection-wec
title	South Australian Well-being and Engagement Collection (WEC)
description	The WEC is an annual student survey administered by the South Australian Department for Education to measure emotional well-being, school engagement, learning readiness, and health and well-being in public-school students in Years 4–12.
status	review
moved_from	element/wec-wellbeing-engagement-collection-survey
product_kind	assessment
generated	by process:sweep-kinds on 2026-10-10
trust	unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources	1 — marrone-2024

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