Development of a Measure of Equity-Based Social Emotional Learning Practices

This grant will supplement an existing reducing inequality major research grant. That study examines the potential of social-emotional learning instruction to leverage youths’ emerging understanding of community issues and social injustices in order to promote a range of youth competencies including healthy personal and social identities, a sense of collective agency, and skills for analyzing social issues. In that study, teachers used an instructional approach that explicitly integrated equity and social justice with social-emotional learning. Rivas-Drake posits that researchers, evaluators, program developers, and school leaders would benefit from a measure to assess teachers’ practices around racial equity-oriented social-emotional learning practices. With this award, the team will examine the reliability of a quantitative measure of racial equity-based social-emotional learning practices with teachers in three large school districts that serve significant populations of racially marginalized youth. Ultimately, this work will yield a validated, field-tested measure that can be administered in large urban school districts that serve racially marginalized students.