Chile: A New System for Schools to Assess Socio-Emotional Learning With an Improvement Approach

• In Event: Transforming Education Systems for Holistic Student Development: Learning From Case Studies Around the World

Abstract

Purpose
The goal of this paper is to describe and analyze a new system to assess socio-emotional learning, the Comprehensive Learning Diagnosis (CLD), that has been implemented in Chile during COVID times. This new system provides opportunities to promote school improvement based on an integrated vision of children and adolescent education.
Perspective
Chilean education has important challenges of quality, equity, and social segmentation. For decades, policies tried to respond to them through a high-stakes accountability institutional framework which has not had success.
The underlying vision of educational quality has been partial. The assessment system in place in Chile privileged cognitive and academic dimensions of educational results. Socio-emotional learning had been neglected or regarded as secondary, without an infrastructure of assessment tools that allowed teachers and principals to diagnose students´ situations and monitor their progress.
The COVID-19 crisis presented an opportunity for change: students’ socio-emotional needs were a main concern for schools and society, and the regular accountability system based on standardized tests was interrupted. During this period, the CLD was launched by the National Quality Agency. The CLD is a voluntary assessment tool made available to all Chilean schools. It promotes a comprehensive development of students, providing timely information and guidance to internally monitor learning in academic and socio-emotional domains.
Methods
This paper was compiled based on document analysis of both national and international policy and theoretical literature about assessment policies. All existing CLD reports that the National Quality Agency has produced have been examined, compared, and integrated. The authors have expertise in educational policies as researchers and public servants.
Results
The CLD is an innovative evaluation system that has only been applied from the second half of 2020 onwards. There are still no far-reaching evaluations or conclusive studies on its implementation. However, there are five preliminary results on different aspects that are notable:
1) Wide acceptance in school communities: Approximately 80% of schools opted voluntarily to participate in the CLD system.
2) Practical use by schools: A survey on the use of CLD revealed that a very large majority of teachers and principals affirmed that the CLD made it possible to ascertain students´ emotions as well as their academic progress. The aggregated information at the level of each course was considered the most useful for making decisions.
3) Listen to students’ voices on the management of school: The CLD enables students to become valid informants regarding schools´ practices to promote socio-emotional learning.
4) A worrying diagnosis of social-emotional wellbeing, especially among female high school students, during the pandemic.
5) Commitment to projecting CLD in post-pandemic educational policy. The new government declared its commitment to maintain CLD in the future and to review the current national system of testing that existed before COVID.
Significance
The crisis caused by the pandemic has been tragic but also provided an opportunity for educational innovation. Drawing upon international experiences that reveal new methods and tools for assessing socio-emotional students’ progress is particularly useful in changing evaluation policies and promoting authentic school improvement.

Authors

• Jose Weinstein, Universidad Diego Portales
  Presenting Author

• Juan Bravo, Minister of Education - Chile
  Presenting Author