Developing context-specific measures of children’s SEL in partnership with the education ecosystem: Lessons from Colombia, Haiti, Honduras, and Liberia

• In Event: Social Emotional Learning and Soft Skills Measurement: Where We Are, and Where We Want to be

Proposal

Programs focused on supporting children’s SEL skills can help children deal with the adverse physiological and psychological effects of being exposed to the risk factors that come with living through emergencies (Baker-Henningham, Walker, Powell, & Gardner, 2009; Jordans et al., 2010; Puerta, Valerio, & Bernal, 2016; Torrente et al., 2019). Given the positive effects that SEL has for children, especially those who have experienced severe adversity, there has been a growing emphasis on SEL in education policies and programs around the world (example: USAID, 2018). However, how SEL skills are defined, codified, and operationalized in research and how these conceptualizations are translated in program and practice are not always consistent or agreed upon. This trend is partly because SEL skills are highly socially normative and dependent on the environment within which they are expressed (Jones, Zaslow, Darling-Churchill, & Halle, 2016). Studies from low-resource, majority world contexts like Tanzania and Malawi, albeit small in volume, have provided empirical evidence on the divergence between SEL skills valued in these countries and those frequently highlighted in high-resource societies such as the United States (Jukes et al., 2018; Lee, Yang, & Zuilkowski, 2019).

The context-specificity of SEL skills affects how they are measured as well. In the absence of a more nuanced understanding of how SEL skills manifest in a specific context, some measures may be mischaracterized or biased. There are two related challenges to measuring children’s SEL skills in low-resource and fragile contexts. First, a majority of the measures that have been developed for SEL and wellbeing were initially developed for use in high-resource, stable contexts (Halle & Darling-Churchill, 2016). Second, the measures that are used in low-resource and fragile contexts often do not sufficiently capture the dimensions of identified SEL skills and wellbeing constructs in a substantive and practical manner. To address these issues, our research—Contextually Relevant Emotional and Social Wellbeing Tools (CREST)—focused on working with the education ecosystem in Colombia, Haiti, Honduras, and Liberia to address the following research questions:

1. How do primary school-age children, parents, and educators in the countries/districts under study define social and emotional skills important in the lives of children?
2. What are feasible steps to transform these context-specific definitions of important social and emotional skills into assessments of these constructs?
3. What are the psychometric properties (validity and reliability) of these context-specific social and emotional measures?

In this panel, we will focus on the first two research questions. We will provide an overview of the findings from the interviews and focus groups conducted across the four countries, focusing on the similarities and differences in the SEL skills, definitions, and prioritizations that emerged. We will then discuss how we worked with stakeholders from each education ecosystem to use the findings from the interviews and focus groups to develop context-specific measures of selected SEL skills. We will end with a brief discussion of how our learnings across the four countries can help others consider similar measure development in other contexts.

Authors

• Nikhit D'Sa, University of Notre Dame

• Jeongmin Lee, University of Notre Dame