Preparing Youth to Thrive: Methodology and Findings from the Social and Emotional Learning Challenge

Authors C Smith, G McGovern, S. C. Peck, R Larson, B Hillaker and L Roy Published by Forum for Youth Investment (2016)

This US project was a research and practice partnership between the Susan Crown Exchange (SCE), staff teams from eight exemplary out of school time (OST) programmes and the David P. Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality (CYPQ).

It aimed to identify "promising" practices for building social and emotional learning (SEL) skills with vulnerable young people. Here, "promising" indicates practices that have some supporting evidence of effectiveness but where further evidence of higher rigour has yet to be collected. The project also aimed to develop detailed descriptors of high-quality staff behaviour and young people's experience to allow for application and replication in other contexts.

The study began by undertaking a range of qualitative data collection methods in each of the exemplary organisations, producing a detailed case study report for each. Alongside the case study reports, the research evaluated the performance of each programme "offering" through collecting a range of performance data. By combining the two pieces of data the study then developed a set of detailed descriptors and performance benchmarks for quality SEL programme offerings.

SEL evidence base

Broadly, the researchers define social and emotional skills as a young person's ability to self-regulate and demonstrate individual agency. As the authors note, there remains many gaps in the evidence base on SEL but the research cites substantial existing evidence that suggests that SEL skill-building has an "important impact on a wide range of skills and outcomes" and that "SEL skills transfer across settings and improve skill learning in other contexts". They go on to conclude that it is vulnerable young people who most require settings designed to foster SEL skills - partly because they are the least likely to have access to such settings.

Participating programmes

As it is a US-based study, there were some differences in programme offering compared with the UK - although there was considerable overlap. The research project included a girls' peer support group, a poetry programme, boat building, outdoor adventure and an outreach life skills and service learning programme. The eight participating programmes spanned across different US cities, with incomes ranging from $374,000 to $24.8 million and involving young people aged between 12 and 19 years old. All engagement was intensive, ranging from 39 to 370 contact hours. Finally, all programmes were defined by staff as targeting vulnerable young people including possessing low social and emotional skills.

SEL standards and benchmarks

The project findings include both a set of standards for SEL practice and a set of benchmarks for high quality SEL delivery that others can draw on to improve the quality of their provision. The project produced 34 standards for high-quality SEL delivery that cut across six domains of practice - emotion management, empathy, teamwork, responsibility, initiative and problem-solving. The performance data found that the participating programmes were indeed exemplary with a number of "benchmarks" that underpinned this high quality of SEL delivery. These benchmarks include that the programmes had diverse staff and youth, intensive participation and expert adult guidance including staff intentionally recruiting an ethnically diverse group of young people and having well-trained staff with low turnover. Another benchmark was that they had highly collaborative organisational cultures including both staff-to-staff and staff-to-manager collaboration. Finally, the programme offerings shared certain design features including intensive participation in challenging activities, responsive practices and structured check-ins and an integrated approach to implementing the six domains of SEL practice identified above.

Implications for practice

The definitions of good practice used in the study are not new and can be found within existing literature but, rather, provide sufficient evidence to describe quality at a granular level (including adult behaviour, basic instructional processes and short-term youth behaviour change) and align these descriptors with performance measures.

Despite some important caveats the research concluded that these measures are sufficiently reliable for use by both practitioners as part of a continuous improvement process and by evaluators aiming to compare and differentiate between settings, individuals and over time.

The research offers practitioners the detailed, relevant and meaningful tools they require to understand, reflect on and continuously improve their impact on social and emotional learning.

Explicit in the approach is a two-step argument that "good measurement requires good description" and that "what gets measured can be moved".

The Centre for Youth Impact is a community of organisations that work together to progress thinking and practice around impact measurement in youth work and services for young people.

FURTHER READING

• What Mattered Ten Years On? Young People's Reflections on Their Involvement with a Charitable Youth Participation Project, Body, A. & Hogg, E., Journal of Youth Studies (2018)
• Public Spending on Children in England: 2000 to 2020, Kelly, E., Lee, T., Sibieta, L. & Waters, T., Institute for Fiscal Studies (2018)
• Can You Bottle a Good Relationship? Learning About Mentoring in the Talent Match Programme, Knott, P., The Centre for Youth Impact (2018)
• The Value of Out-of-School Time Programs, McCombs, J., Whitaker, A., & Yoo, P. RAND Corporation (2017)
• Universal Youth Work: A Critical Review of the Literature, McGregor, C., Edinburgh Youth Work Consortium (2015)
• Working With Young People: The Value of Youth Work in the European Union. Final Report to the European Commission, Dunne, A., Ulicna, D., Murphy, I., & Golubeva, M., Brussels: ICF International (2014)

This article is part of CYP Now's special report on Youth Work Impact. Click here for more