Development and Validation of the ACT Tessera Social and Emotional Learning Assessment System

• In Event: 25.079 - Leveraging Social and Emotional Learning for Student Success: From Assessment to Program Implementation

Abstract

ACT Tessera is a social and emotional learning assessment system designed to assess and intervene upon the social and emotional skills of middle and high school students. There are middle school and high school forms of the assessment which are designed to measure five important skills: grit, cooperation, resilience, curiosity, and leadership. The assessment uses the Big Five personality taxonomy as its organizing framework, with Big Five factors aligning to Tessera factors accordingly: conscientiousness (grit), agreeableness (cooperation), emotional stability (resilience), openness to experience (curiosity), and extraversion (leadership). Furthermore, each of the five skills is measured with three methods: self-report Likert-type items, situational judgment tests, and forced choice. After completion of the assessment, educators and students receive reports on students’ results, complete with feedback on improving student skills. Skill-building lessons and activities are delivered via a tool provided to each participating school called the Tessera Teacher Playbook.
This paper discusses the development of the ACT Tessera assessment and the Tessera Teacher Playbook, and the validation of assessment. First, the use of the Big Five personality framework as the assessment framework will be discussed. There were many considerations for choice of assessment framework, including the framework’s ability to be used as an interpretive guide for the myriad social and emotional skills, research evidence supporting the framework’s structure being a comprehensive representation of people’s skills, predictive validity evidence, and cross-cultural generalizability. An evaluation of each of these factors lead us to select the Big Five as our assessment framework.
Next, two studies are described, one for each Tessera form (middle and high school). The middle school study was conducted with 2,852 students from 14 schools across the United States, and the high school study was conducted with 2,142 students from 11 schools. The purpose of each study was to evaluate the reliability and validity of each form. Results revealed that the middle school scales had acceptable internal consistency (Likert: α = .67 - .75; SJT: α = .68 - .84), as did the high school scales (Likert: α = .72 - .78; SJT: α = .63 - .86). Test information functions for the forced choice scales demonstrated high reliability around the moderate levels of the latent traits. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated good fit for the Likert and forced choice items, but moderate to poor fit for the situational judgment test items for both assessments. Furthermore, the assessments demonstrated evidence for validity. For instance, the middle school assessment correlated with GPA (r = .20-.46), as did the high school assessment (r = .19-.41). Each measurement method provided incremental validity in the prediction of grades.
This paper will conclude with a discussion of the development of the Tessera Teacher Playbook. Additionally, the development of new versions of Tessera will be discussed. These include an elementary version (3rd through 5th grade), a college version, and a workforce version. After each is complete we will have SEL assessments that measure populations ranging from third grade students all the way through adults in the middle of their careers.

Author

• Kate Walton, ACT, Inc.