The Echo

Published Online: February 4, 2011


Study Finds Social-Skills Teaching Boosts Academics

By Sarah D. Sparks

From role-playing games for students to parent seminars, teaching social and emotional learning requires a lot of moving parts, but when all the pieces come together such instruction can rival the effectiveness of purely academic interventions to boost student achievement, according to the largest analysis of such programs to date.

In the report published today in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development, researchers led by Joseph A. Durlak, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Chicago, found that students who took part in social and emotional learning, or SEL, programs improved in grades and standardized-test scores by 11 percentile points compared with nonparticipating students. That difference, the authors say, was significant—equivalent to moving a student in the middle of the class academically to the top 40 percent of students during the course of the intervention. Such improvement fell within the range of effectiveness for recent analyses of interventions focused on academics.


Here's the rest of the story:  http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/02/04/20sel.h30.html?tkn=WQNFELArcqZMg0R5kEANZ%2By%2BUZUtqEboYqjH&cmp=clp-edweek

Here's the study:  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01564.x/abstract