How do Schools and Teachers Influence Socio-Emotional Learning?

This project seeks to conduct academic research examining the importance of socio-emotional learning (SEL) on postsecondary outcomes, aims to identify those schools and teachers that tend to promote this SEL, and seeks to employ high-quality data on school and classroom practices (from the 5 Essentials survey and others) to identify those school and classroom practices that are most strongly associated with promoting students SEL and postsecondary success (i.e. college going etc.) and labor market outcomes. We aim to pay particular attention to differences across more and less advantaged student populations. The output from the proposed work includes up to three research papers that will be published in high-impact scholarly journals in economics and psychology. Other key outputs will include nontechnical research summaries that can be used by policymakers and practitioners in the field and presentations and conferences to disseminate the findings. To better promote best practices in the field, we also aim to share our findings with the Chicago Public Schools and also individual schools (the primary stakeholders).