Developing an Objective Assessment of Students' Emotion Regulation for Use in Elementary School Through High School

• In Event: The Development and Initial Validation of Four Ecologically Valid, Multidimensional, and Scalable Social-Emotional Learning Assessment Tools

Abstract

An increasing number of schools are prioritizing social and emotional learning across all grade levels (Dusenbury, Dermody, & Weissberg, 2018). Currently, the interest in SEL programming is outpacing the development of valid assessments of SEL skills and research-based benchmarks for student competencies. The vast majority of social-emotional assessments currently being used in schools are subjective questionnaires, the validity of which is limited by respondent bias and insufficient respondent insight into mental processes (Duckworth & Yeager, 2015). Research shows that self-reports of emotion skills are only weakly correlated with direct assessments of these skills (Brackett & Mayer, 2003; Brackett et al., 2006). Therefore, direct assessments are needed that provide valid data in grades K through 12 to establish research-based developmental benchmarks for students’ social and emotional competencies and to allow for formative assessment of skill growth in the classroom.

In this presentation, we discuss our work to date on developing and pilot-testing a novel direct assessment of students’ emotion regulation skills designed for school-based use in preschool through 12th grade. We are developing the assessment using an iterative process involving multiple opportunities for input from educators. Our assessment measures students’ abilities to generate thoughts to change emotional experiences, a skill known as “cognitive emotion regulation.” The assessment consists of brief situational vignettes presented verbally. Each vignette depicts a situation that is expected to elicit the emotion of anger, anxiety, disappointment, or boredom based on appraisal theories of emotion (Lazarus, 1991; Roseman, 1996). All vignettes take place in a school context and were written and revised in collaboration with educators to ensure ecological validity for students in preschool through 12th grade. Following verbal presentation of each vignette, students are provided with open-ended prompts to generate as many different ways as they can think of to feel better in that situation, including what they could say to themselves to feel better.

To date, we have conducted focus groups with 13 educators in grades K through 12 to obtain feedback on the assessment and we have pilot-tested the assessment with 36 students in preschool, 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 9th grade (see Table 2.1). Themes emerging from the educator focus groups include the importance of linking the assessment results to instructional recommendations, an interest in using the assessment to track student growth over the course of a year, and enthusiasm for a combination of open-response and multiple-choice formats for flexible administration. Preliminary observations from the student pilot-testing have suggested that the assessment in its current format may be too challenging for preschool and kindergarten-aged children, but that students in 1st grade and above can respond appropriately. We will present data from our pilot-testing on the nature of students’ self-generated cognitive emotion regulation strategies across grade levels. We will engage the audience in a discussion of the potential utility of this assessment for student emotion regulation skill benchmarking and formative assessment, and we will discuss further modifications that may be needed to ensure its utility to education researchers and practitioners alike.

Authors

• Cynthia Jean Willner, Yale University

• Jessica D. Hoffmann, Yale University

• Craig Steven Bailey, Yale School of Medicine

• Zi-Jia Ng, Yale University

• Alexandra Harrison, The University of Alabama

• Beatris Garcia, Yale University

• Marc A. Brackett, Yale University