Apply the review's three-level criteria to critically assess SEL integration in a school climate measure before adoption¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 3 claims (3 for) · 1 study (1 review), q3 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 3 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The review offers a three-level coding scheme for judging how a school climate measure embeds SEL support: (1) whether it includes an explicitly SEL-oriented subscale, (2) whether it includes items operationalizing social and emotional skills in students, and (3) whether it includes subscales the literature shows to be conceptually related to SEL. The authors state: "We encourage researchers and practitioners to apply our three-level criteria, to critically assess if a given school climate measure satisfies the integration of SEL support to be implemented in their settings."

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Access to the measure's full subscale and item content, since nine measures lacked publicly available item lists

Constraints¶

• Level 3 provides evidence of conceptual linkage, not direct assessment of SEL support

Target Learners¶

• Upper middle and secondary school students

Target Learning Goals¶

• Selecting school climate measures that adequately integrate support for social and emotional learning

Claims¶

• Only 4.65% of the 43 most-used school climate measures include an explicitly SEL-oriented subscale [+W]
• Nearly all (90.7%) of the most-used school climate measures include subscales conceptually related to SEL support, covering 55.04% of all subscales [+W]
• About 6% of items in the most-used measures operationalize students' social and emotional skills, appearing in 58.14% of measures [+W]

Related Strategies¶

• Combine existing school climate instruments with theoretically aligned SEL modules rather than developing new measures

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Castro, C., Barata, M. C., Alexandre, J., & Santos, R. (2026). Placing Social and Emotional Support at the Center of School Climate: A Scoping Review of Measures for Middle and Secondary Schools. Educational Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-026-10192-x