Social and emotional (SE) skills are interpersonal, self-regulatory, and task-related behaviors that are important for adaptation to and successful performance across all domains of life, including education and workplace settings (Casillas et al., 2015). Family engagement affects the development of these important skills (Brooks & Lambert,…

This study examines the perceptions of parents and caregivers on Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), or in-school programs designed to teach social and emotional skills. The study aims to replicate the main findings from the Fordham report (Tyner, 2021) and examine how the rank-order method used in the study may have influenced the interpretation…

In this study, the authors examined whether placing demographic questions at the beginning of a survey impacts student responses to a social and emotional skills assessment. Participants were students who took the ACT® test on the national testing date in December 2019 and responded to an invitation to participate in research after completing the…

Social and emotional (SE) skills are known to be linked to many important life outcomes, some of which fall in the academic domain. For example, meta-analytic analyses show that conscientiousness (a trait related to self-management, perseverance, and being organized and planful) accounts for 28% of the explained variance in academic performance…

Learners from underserved backgrounds tend to show lower levels of college readiness (ACT, 2016a; ACT, 2018). In part to address these disparities, the authors investigated growth in social and emotional (SE) skills in a cohort of largely Hispanic, high-poverty students who participated in GEAR UP. GEAR UP is a discretionary federal grant program…

The ACT® National Curriculum Survey® is a nationwide survey of educational practices and college and career readiness expectations. Every few years, educators across the country are surveyed about the knowledge and skills students are expected to learn that are essential for college and career readiness. As part of this study, over 6,000…

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, are becoming increasingly prominent. Their use is becoming more and more popular to assist with simple tasks, such as summarizing documents, translating languages, rephrasing sentences, or answering questions. Reports like McKinsey's (Chui, & Yee, 2023) estimate that by implementing LLMs,…

Given recent interest and increasing popularity of social and emotional learning (SEL) in education settings, the authors surveyed students taking the ACT test and parents/caregivers of ACT test-takers on their beliefs around social and emotional (SE) skills. The study had three primary goals. First, the authors were interested in obtaining…

This issue brief is part of a five-part series that reports findings from research conducted by ACT in collaboration with Region One Education Service Center. This brief focuses on establishing conditions for social and emotional learning (SEL) implementation and includes results from a survey administered to educators who attended a professional…

This study investigated the moderating roles of motivation, social engagement, and self-regulation in predicting academic achievement in grades 11-12 for 3,281 7th-9th graders. Standardized assessments of college readiness (ACT® Explore and the ACT® test) and student self-report measures of social emotional learning factors (ACT® Engage® Grades…

Listening to and implementing user feedback is an essential component of product development; however, such feedback cannot be followed blindly but instead must be considered in conjunction with empirical data. We received feedback from teachers and administrators on the prior version of the individual student report from the assessment component…

Self-report inventories are commonly administered to measure social and emotional learning competencies related to college readiness. If students respond inattentively or dishonestly, validity will suffer. This study applies several methods of detecting insufficient effort responding (IER) to data from ACT® Engage®. Different methods indicated…

This study was done in collaboration with the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships (NCCEP) and Alliance College-Ready Public Schools (Alliance). This report, the second in the series, Examining the Efficacy of Career & College Clubs, explores how changes in the college readiness areas of social and emotional skills,…

The interactions of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) in predicting social and emotional (SE) skills was examined for 81,950 6th-8th graders. At low levels of SES, White students tended to have the lower SE scores. However, as SES increased, they tended to have higher scores relative to minority groups. Across SES levels, Asian…

This issue brief is part of a five-part series that reports findings from research conducted by ACT in collaboration with Region One Education Service Center. This brief focuses on the efficacy of SEL lessons implemented during the 2019-2020 school year and examines their relationship to school-reported student outcomes such as grades, attendance,…