Center for Standards, Assessment, and Accountability

Grade Level: Early Learning

Are You Ready to Assess Social and Emotional Development?

The Ready to Assess toolkit is a suite of three resources that help school and district educators consider and select assessments on social and emotional learning (SEL). The toolkit includes the following:

Brief – A general overview on the landscape of social and emotional assessment is provided, as well as a considerations of whether or not using an SEL assessment is the right move.
Decision Tree – Introduced in the Brief, this resource goes into more depth about the purposes of assessing, the rigor of the assessment, the practicality and the burden of using the assessment, and the ethics of assessment.
Tools Index – This is a list assessments identified by AIR for exploring social and emotional knowledge, attitudes, and skills.

Evaluation of Professional Development in the Use of Arts-Integrated Activities with Mathematics Content: Findings from the Evaluation of the Wolf Trap Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination Grant

A four-year American Institutes of Research (AIR) evaluation of a Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts professional-development program for teachers found that elementary students outperformed their peers in mathematics when taught by teachers using this arts-integration approach. In a randomized controlled trial in 22 elementary schools in a large, suburban school district, AIR examined the implementation of the program and assessed its impact on teacher practice and students’ mathematics knowledge. The report provides hypothesized factors that may have played a role in the results as well as recommendations for up-scaling and future research.