Attend to both SEL status and SEL growth when identifying students who may need supports to stay on track to graduate¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

This strategy recommends that early-warning identification of at-risk students should not rely only on a single timepoint SEL score. The article concludes that "educators could benefit from paying attention to both status and growth when trying to identify and support students who may not graduate from high school," because growth in self-management predicted 9th-grade outcomes above and beyond 6th-grade status. Practically, this means tracking changes in self-management across middle school alongside current scores when flagging students for academic and SEL supports.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Longitudinal SEL survey data scored on a common scale across years, so within-student change can be interpreted

Constraints¶

• The article's evidence is observational and limited to one high-poverty district; self-management was the only consistently predictive construct, and no construct predicted chronic absenteeism

Target Learners¶

• Middle school students transitioning to high school

Target Learning Goals¶

• Early identification of academic disengagement and dropout risk

Related Strategies¶

• Use school-level data systems to identify which students need which types of support for dropout prevention
• Provide schools real-time early warning data reports and credit recovery reports to monitor student performance and support on-track progress
• Use person-centered trajectory identification to target motivational interventions at at-risk students

Examples¶

-

Key Sources¶

• Soland, J. & Kuhfeld, M. (2019). Identifying students who are off-track academically in 9th Grade: the role of social-emotional learning trajectories. (NWEA Collaborative for Student Growth Research Brief). https://www.nwea.org/research/publication/identifying-students-who-are-off-track-academically-in-9th-grade-the-role-of-social-emotional-learning-trajectories/