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Adaptation of measures for child and contextual appropriateness: Social-emotional skill assessment

Tue, April 16, 5:00 to 6:30pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Atrium (Level 2), Garden Room A

Proposal

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) covers key intrapersonal and interpersonal skills that children use in understanding their emotions, managing their behavior, and successfully navigating their relationships. Over the last few years, SEL programming has become more common in Education in Emergencies given the evidence that children demonstrate remarkable psychosocial resilience and academic achievement when provided with education opportunities that include SEL. With an increasing focus on programming has come an interest in how to reliably and validly measure social and emotional skills in children. While there are myriad measures for different social and emotional skills, the sector still struggles with how to adapt measures so that they have psychometric rigor and face validity in a variety of contexts.

The International Social and Emotional Learning Assessment attempts to systematize the process of adaptation so that field staff in different countries and contexts can use the tool with diverse populations. ISELA helps us understand the development of SEL skills in children between the ages of 6-12 years, and whether this development differs by key equity factors: age, gender, socioeconomic status, exposure to adversity, and SEL environment around the child. When used cross-sectionally ISELA provides an aggregate profile of children’s SEL competencies and the SEL environment in the school, center, or community. When used longitudinally, ISELA provides an aggregate picture of how the different SEL skills change over time. ISELA is not meant to be a diagnostic tool. The tool was not designed to be used to identify which children require targeted psychological counselling or other mental health programming.

To ensure that ISELA is contextually relevant we use an established adaptation process:
1. Review by country team: Field and program staff review the assessment to ensure it assesses skills that are meaningful in their context
2. Translation into program language: Assessment translated into program language
3. Back translation into English: Assessment translated back into English by different translator
4. Cognitive testing with enumerators: Each item is tested for understanding and use of child-friendly language
5. Develop item responses: During training, enumerators develop item responses that are appropriate and inappropriate given their cultural and social context.
6. Testing assessment: Two-days of pre-testing in non-sampled schools with children in target grades to establish inter rater reliability and field-test response options
7. Revision: Assessment is revised and finalized

During this round table session, we will walk through each step in the adaptation process and talk about the challenges we have faced and the best practices that we have developed for the adaptation of ISELA.

Authors