Quantifying the Influence of Classrooms on Students' Social and Emotional Learning

• In Event: Causes and Consequences of Student Self-Reported Social-Emotional Learning: Lessons From the CORE Districts

Abstract

There are multiple settings that influence the development of students’ social and emotional learning (SEL), including at home, in their community, and at school. Indeed, research shows that schools have a measurable impact on students’ growth in SEL from one year to the next (e.g., Authors 2018, 2019). There is also evidence that teachers, in particular, can establish classroom environments that contribute to students’ social and emotional development (Blazar & Kraft, 2017; Kraft, 2017; Jackson, 2014, 2018).

In this paper, we quantify this contribution by applying statistical methods (i.e., value-added models) typically used to assess school or teacher impacts on math and English language arts to students’ self-reported surveys of four SEL competencies; this allows us to examine whether there are measurable differences in the impact that classrooms have on students’ growth in self-reported SEL. We analyze data from the 2015-16 and 2016-17 administrations of CORE’s student self-report SEL surveys, which contain responses from roughly 40,000 students in Grade 5 within five of California’s CORE Districts. We focus on fifth grade because students are typically in self-contained classrooms with one teacher of record, which allows us to isolate the effect of individual classrooms on students’ SEL growth. We estimate separate value-added models for each of the four SEL constructs assessed—growth mindset, self-efficacy, self-management, and social awareness—and for math and ELA academic growth, for comparison. In these models, we compare the use of instrumental variables (IV) regression to errors-in-variables (EIV) regression in order to explore the most robust approach for accounting for measurement error in the lagged (i.e., pretest) measures of SEL and academic outcomes that appear on the right-hand-side of the regression equation.

Results show that growth models of SEL do not perform as well as growth models of academic outcomes, but the magnitude of classroom-level impacts on students’ growth in SEL is similar to those in ELA and math. Importantly, we show that across-classroom-within-school impacts are larger in magnitude than across-school impacts on students’ SEL growth; in other words, there appears to be a larger influence on students’ growth in SEL at the classroom level than at the school level. Finally, we show that there are generally low correlations between classroom-level growth in SEL and classroom-level growth in ELA or math; however, growth mindset stands apart from the other three SEL constructs in that there is a moderately strong relationship. Taken together, by assessing whether we can develop a sound approach for measuring classroom-level influences on students’ SEL, we aim to contribute to the growing body of knowledge about appropriate and innovative uses of data on students’ non-cognitive and social-emotional learning.

Authors

• Robert H. Meyer, Education Analytics

• Libby Pier, Education Analytics

• Jordan Mader, Education Analytics

• Andrew B Rice, Education Analytics Inc.