Introduction

There has been an ongoing youth mental health crisis in the United States (U.S.), which was worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Social emotional learning (SEL) programs have become prevalent in school settings because they are beneficial in reducing behavioral and psychological concerns and increasing SECs in five core areas (self-awareness, self- management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making) (Durlak, 2011; Durlak et al., 2022). SEL implementation has focused predominantly on elementary school students (Durlak et al., 2022), often overlooking adolescents, who first experience prominent psychological and social challenges through the transitional period of middle school. While some SEL programs in middle and high schools yield positive outcomes (Durlak et al., 2022), more work is needed on the implementation and evaluation of these evidence-based practices. A key to a program’s success might be with implementation guiding its use and adaptation to the setting, which typically involves community partnership, ongoing process, and outcome evaluation.

The goal of this larger study is to develop an early adolescent SEC self-report measure, aimed at 6th to 8th grade students, that is (a) public domain, (b) developed through stakeholder input from teachers, parents, and students, and (c) includes developmentally appropriate items that comprehensively measure SEC changes. It is essential that this measure is part of public domain in order to reduce burden on and increase sustainability with schools’ effective SEL program implementation and for stakeholder involvement to engage teachers, parents, and students with the effective implementation (Mahoney et al., 2021; Thomson et al., 2018). More specifically, an SEC evaluation measure needs to comprehensively capture this developmental approach with SEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, 2015; Denham, 2018), as there are unique SECs for adolescents (Taylor & Larson, 1999). This developmental focus thus requires input from the people who spend time with these early adolescents (i.e., teachers, parents), as well as the students themselves. Student perspectives are often overlooked, but they should be included as collaborators in order to target the evaluation SEC measures appropriately (Mahoney et al., 2021). Taking an empowerment evaluation approach (Fetterman & Wandersman, 2005), this measure will help improve program implementation, performance, and capacity building through a free, public domain measure that can be used to comprehensively conduct SEC evaluations of early adolescents.

This poster documents the progress in developing the M-SEC-EA. Initial data collection to generate an item pool for this measure began in September 2024 and will continue through spring 2025. Participants include students in 6th-8th grades, middle school teachers, and parents or caregivers with primary or shared guardianship of a child in one of these grades. We are recruiting participants in specific school districts in southwestern Ohio to be representative of demographics similar to state and national levels (i.e., socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, urbanicity) through schools and public libraries. We are conducting open-ended, semi-structured interviews with the participants to ask their understanding of the five core SECs in the target age group. We also ask for examples of what comes to mind for each competency while thinking about themselves, their friends, or classmates (students), for their children and their children’s friends (parents), or for their current and former students and classes (teachers). We plan to analyze data using both deductive and inductive approaches, with data coded to align with the theory driven from the CASEL framework and through thematic analysis to generate new overarching themes that might not be included in the existing SECs. This analysis will serve as the initial development phase involving stakeholder input in developing appropriate items for the measure.

Research Question(s)

What is an appropriate measure for middle school student SECs?