How are social and emotional learning and life skills defined across the world? Looking inside and across international frameworks

• In Event: From soft skills to labor skills: adapting soft skills trainings to the needs for your target populations.

Proposal

Supporting children and young people to develop social, emotional, and related life skills is critical for developing responsible citizens, ending poverty and conflict, and achieving global sustainability. Research shows that these skills are important to many areas of development, including learning, health, and wellbeing (Moffitt et al, 2011; Jones, Greenberg, & Crowley, 2015; Jones & Kahn, 2017) and may be especially relevant for children and youth around the world who face chronic stress related to poverty, violence, and discrimination (e.g., Dupuy et al, 2018; Alexander, Boothby, & Wessells, 2010). However, these skills are referred to by many names (including social and emotional learning (SEL), 21st century skills, life skills, soft skills, citizenship education, etc.) and there is a lack of consensus about which skills are important, what they should be called, and whether and how they relate to each other. This is in part because the domain is structured around a large number of frameworks (i.e. organizing models/systems that guide policy and practice such as CASEL, Developmental Assets, etc.) that sometimes define and describe skills using different – or even contradictory – language (Reeves & Venator, 2014). This challenge leads to imprecision and variability in how constructs are measured and promoted in both research and intervention contexts (Jones, Zaslow, Darling-Churchill, & Halle, 2016), and threatens to undermine high-quality work in the field: without clarity about what skills matter most and what evidence tells us about how to promote them, we risk designing interventions, measurement tools, or policies in ways that do not accurately reflect the literature and waste precious time and resources.

This challenge is intensified in international settings as there is limited research describing how social, emotional, and related life skills are conceptualized across diverse global contexts (Garner et al, 2014; Merrell et al, 2010). Despite recent interest to embed competencies such as SEL, life skills, and psychosocial support within international education standards and practices (Varela, Kelcey, Reyes, Gould, & Sklar, 2013; INEE, 2018; USAID/ECCN, 2018), the vast majority of research comes from US contexts, and more work is required to determine whether this research accurately reflects the competencies needed for success in other cultures and contexts, and whether it will translate effectively across diverse settings (Garner, Mahatmya, Brown, & Vesely, 2014; Merrell, Gueldner & Castro-Olivo, 2010). In other words, when considering the global landscape, there are a number of questions about the meaning as well as the rigor and fit of existing skills. As a result, many in the international education sector have called for increased research and inquiry into how these skills are conceptualized, developed, and measured in both formal and informal learning settings internationally (INEE, 2017; IRC, 2017).

In response to this challenge, our team developed a rigorous coding system that when applied to frameworks in the field, can be used to identify related skills across them, thus linking terms by how they are defined rather than what they are called. The coding system is designed to capture whether/when the various competencies described within each framework align with 150+ common SEL skills (e.g., “identifies emotions in others”) across 22 sub-domains (e.g., empathy, conflict resolution, etc.) and 6 broad domains (e.g., emotion, interpersonal, etc.). We then calculate the similarity between two terms based on how many overlapping codes they receive. This paper summarizes the process and findings from our work to integrate 20 international frameworks into our existing database of primarily US-based frameworks. In doing so, we are able to explore: (1) how closely related are the discrete skills in each framework; (2) how much agreement is there in the type of skills these frameworks include; (3) what are the major clusters of skills that appear across the broad international education landscape; and (4) how do these skills compare with those from US contexts?

The incorporation of international frameworks into our analysis increases the validity of our findings by expanding our data set to include a more diverse and globally representative set of terms for comparison. For example, we include key frameworks from: formal and informal education; emergency and refugee contexts; multilateral, non-profit, and government agencies; high, middle, and low-income country settings; across the developmental continuum; and spanning a broad range of disciplines and approaches. With this data, we are able to analyze how SEL is defined, measured, and promoted across culturally, ethnically, and politically diverse contexts, helping us to better understand cultural variation of SEL within and across specific populations.

Our research process and methods included (a) identifying key international frameworks, (b) coding frameworks and the specific skills/competencies within them, (c) creating detailed profiles for each framework, and (d) updating a set of online interactive tools (data-based visualizations and thesaurus) designed to help researchers, policymakers, and practitioners navigate variety and complexity in the field. Updates to our original coding system were made to accommodate new ways of discussing/defining skills in various contexts and cultures. In addition, we conducted interviews with 30+ stakeholders in the field of international and comparative education and analyzed them for how skills are understood and approached from global perspective, with a particular focus on cultural relevance and adaptation. Findings include a quantitative analysis of how frequently skills with the same name have different definitions and skills with different names have similar definitions, as well as how terms are clustered based on the coding of their definitions. We further use this information to highlight areas of commonality and divergence across US-based and newly-coded international frameworks in ways that help those working in international settings to understand and communicate about the skills they seek to measure and promote in children, and enable us to draw comparisons between international and US-based frameworks.

By expanding its scope beyond the United States, this project is designed to support the international education ecosystem by generating a more accurate, transparent, and comprehensive reflection of SEL from a global perspective, enabling international actors to more effectively define, discuss, promote, and assess social, emotional, and related life skills that are most important to their contexts, ultimately promoting positive and sustainable development for all.

Authors

• Katharine Elizabeth Brush, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Rebecca Bailey, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Bryan Nelson, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Emily Meland, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Stephanie M Jones, Harvard Graduate School of Education