Using ACT Tessera Data for Program Planning and Student Success

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

Abstract

Ensuring we can Social and Emotional skills with validity and reliability is a far more worthwhile endeavor if we can simultaneously ensure that educators can use the resulting data in valuable ways. This paper will take the position that just as academic (“cognitive”) achievement and growth data valuably informs and improves the work of educators, so too can social and emotional (“noncognitive”) achievement and growth data. In this discussion, pioneering work with the use of such data by the California CORE districts, and by other districts in Washington state, Nevada, and Massachusetts will be reviewed. It will also consider how new US federal educational policy, (the Every Student Succeeds Act), elevates the importance of using these kinds of social and emotional learning data.
The paper will then look more closely at how schools are using ACT Tessera specific data, both aggregated data for planning and evaluation purposes, and also individualized data for working with individual students. Case studies of such uses will be presented. Consideration will be given to the challenges and limitations of the use of these data, and the important questions about this usage needing further study and research.

Author

• Jonathan Martin, ACT, Inc.