How Do Social and Emotional Skills Relate to College Readiness Among Various Student Groups?

• In Event: Higher Education Admissions in a Post–Supreme Court Decision Era

Abstract

Social and emotional (SE) skills are related to important academic outcomes for students including grades (Mammadov, 2021; Meyer et al., 2023; Poropat, 2009), and ACT scores (Anguiano-Carrasco et al., 2022). While there is an abundance of evidence about these relationships for students overall, less is known about this relationship when disaggregating results by gender, race/ethnicity, and income levels. For example, two meta-analyses explored if the relationship between SE skills, and academic achievement differs based on gender and the results are contradictory (Mammadov; Meyer et al.). Therefore, the current study examines the relationship between SE skills and ACT scores across various groups including gender, race/ethnicity, and family income.
Mosaic™ by ACT® Social Emotional Learning assessment data were collected from 6,747 students (53% female and 47% male; 67% White, 12% Hispanic, 6% Black, and 3% Asian; 74% 11th graders and 23% 12th graders when they took the ACT test) and matched to their ACT scores. Their SEL assessment data were captured during the school years 2018–2019 and 2019–2020, while the ACT tests occurred from 2018 to 2021. The assessment measures five social and emotional skills based on the Big Five Framework including Sustaining Effort, Getting Along with Others, Maintaining Composure, Keeping an Open Mind, and Social Connection (see Table 1 for details).
We first examined mean level differences in SE skills and ACT scores for each of the groups. As Table 2 shows, although group differences were found for most measures, these differences tended to be small to moderate in size for SE skills, while differences on ACT scores tended to be larger. We next examined the correlation between SE skills and ACT scores for each group. As shown in Table 3, these relationships were similar across gender and income, and somewhat more variable by race/ethnicity. Specifically, the relationships tended to be smaller for Black students in the skills of Maintaining Composure, Keeping an Open Mind, and Social Connection, and for Asian students, relationships were smaller for the skills of Getting Along with Others and Maintaining Composure. Finally, we predicted ACT scores from SE skills for each group. As Table 4 shows, Sustaining Effort was a significant, positive predictor for all groups. For the remaining skills, significance varied based on the group examined.
To summarize, SE skills were related to ACT scores across groups; however, the magnitude of these relationships varied by group, particularly when disaggregating the data on race/ethnicity. Additionally, SE skills predicted ACT scores for all groups, but the amount of variance explained and the specific skills that were significant predictors of ACT scores varied by group, again in particular when disaggregating results by race/ethnicity. This is noteworthy given that many SE skill levels were relatively similar across racial/ethnic groups. These initial results suggest more work is needed to understand how the relationship between SE skills may vary by group, especially by student race/ethnicity. Understanding how SE skills may influence important academic outcomes among different groups of students can help us prepare all of our students for success.

Authors

• Nola Daley, ACT, Inc.

• Jill McVey, ACT, Inc.

• Cristina Anguiano-Carrasco, ACT, Inc.