SEL Assessment: Tools, Screeners and How to Use Them in MTSS

By the Transforming Education editorial team. Reviewed for accuracy against the sources listed below.

SEL assessment is the set of tools and routines a school uses to understand students' social and emotional competencies well enough to act. Done well, it tells a grade-level team which skills to teach next, shows a counselor which students could use a check-in, and tells a district whether its program is working. Done badly, it produces a spreadsheet of scores that sorts children and changes nothing. This guide is about doing it well.

Three purposes, and the one that comes first

Before choosing any instrument, decide what decision the data will inform. Most school uses fall into three categories.

A fourth use sits underneath all three: formative classroom reflection, where teachers and students look at results together and set goals. It needs no norm tables, only a few well-chosen questions and time to talk; see SEL check-in questions.

The 2018 ASCD article Six Steps to Effective SEL Assessment puts the sequence plainly: decide which skills you will teach and assess, clarify why, choose a tool that fits, partner with parents, plan the forums where teams review the data, and decide how you will act. Its author's warning: assessment reports do nothing if no one looks at them.

Where SEL assessment sits in a multi-tiered system of supports

CASEL's guidance on connecting schoolwide SEL with MTSS and PBIS describes a well-designed MTSS as having multiple tiers of integrated academic and behavioral support, screening to find students who could benefit from more, progress monitoring of evidence-based strategies, and data-driven decision-making. It adds a rule of thumb that keeps assessment honest: a Tier 1 system is working when it meets the needs of at least 80 percent of students, as judged by data such as grades, attendance, behavior, test scores and surveys. If a screener flags 40 percent of a grade, the problem is Tier 1 instruction, not 40 percent of the children.

The same document is clear that adopting schoolwide SEL does not mean abandoning MTSS or PBIS. SEL strengthens both sides of the MTSS framework, academic and behavioral, because learning is social and emotional.

The original Transforming Education toolkit framed the right stance in one phrase: use SEL assessment in MTSS to shine a light, not to affix a label. A flashlight shows a team where strengths and needs are so instruction can respond. A label follows a child, invites stigma, and drives placement decisions a short survey was never built to support. Every design choice below serves the flashlight.

Instruments schools actually use

The descriptions below come from publisher pages, district documentation and the EdInstruments catalog maintained at Brown University. We do not endorse any vendor; check current pricing with publishers.

DESSA (Devereux Student Strengths Assessment)

A strengths-based behavior rating scale. According to EdInstruments, the DESSA has 72 items, covers kindergarten through eighth grade with a newer high school version, and is completed by teachers, after-school staff or parents who know the child. It reports on eight social and emotional competencies built on the CASEL framework. Aperture Education's product FAQ, which the company labels as older information, explains that the eight scales follow CASEL's competencies with optimistic thinking added, that raters consider the past four weeks, and that the DESSA-mini screener uses four rotating forms of eight items each drawn from the full 72. The current publisher, Riverside Insights, positions the DESSA-mini for universal screening and the full DESSA for competency-level assessment.

Best fit: districts that want a norm-referenced teacher rating for elementary and middle grades with a built-in screen-then-assess workflow.

SSIS SEL Brief Scales

The SSIS CoLab publishes the SSIS SEL Brief Scales in teacher forms for preschool and K-12, parent forms for preschool and K-12 in English and Spanish, and a student form for grades 3 to 12 in English and Spanish. Items roll up into a total SEL score and subscale scores for self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making, matching CASEL's five competencies. A companion SSIS SEL Brief + Mental Health Scales version adds items on emotional behavior concerns. Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction lists the broader SSIS SEL system, which also includes screening and progress monitoring scales and a classwide intervention program, among its evidence-based SEL assessment tools.

Best fit: schools that want brief multi-informant ratings organized exactly around the CASEL five.

Panorama SEL surveys

Panorama's student surveys are self-report measures of competencies and of how classrooms and schools support them. EdInstruments lists the instrument as open access, with up to 61 items for grades 6 to 12 and up to 52 items for grades 3 to 5, and subscores such as grit, growth mindset, learning strategies, social perspective taking, self-efficacy, emotion regulation and classroom effort. The company's own SEL page reports use across more than 2,000 districts and 15 million students. The survey content is free to use; the platform, reporting and support are commercial.

Best fit: districts that want student voice on mindsets and climate alongside competencies, with topics they can select.

WCSD-SECA (Washoe County School District Social and Emotional Competency Assessment)

A rare fully free, open-source option. According to the district's October 2018 FAQ, the WCSD-SECA was developed by Washoe County School District in Nevada with CASEL and the University of Illinois at Chicago under an Institute of Education Sciences research-practitioner partnership grant. It consists of a 40-item long form measuring eight domains (self-awareness of strengths and weaknesses, self-awareness of emotions, self-management of emotions, self-management of goals, self-management of school work, relationship skills, social awareness and responsible decision-making), a 17-item short form of global competence, and a 138-item bank for training and item replacement. It is designed for grades 5 to 12, available in English and Spanish, and may be used or adapted without permission. Washoe administers the long form inside its annual student climate survey to roughly 24,000 students in grades 5 to 9 and 11, and reports that, controlling for demographics and prior achievement, students with higher competence scores had standardized reading and math scores about 8 points higher, higher weighted GPAs, and lower suspension and absenteeism rates.

Best fit: districts that want a validated self-report for upper elementary through high school at no cost and are willing to handle administration and scoring themselves.

SEARS (Social Emotional Assets and Resilience Scales)

Published by PAR and authored by Kenneth W. Merrell, the SEARS is a strengths-based cross-informant system for ages 5 to 18. It includes a child self-report for ages 8 to 12 or grades 3 to 6, an adolescent self-report for ages 13 to 18 or grades 7 to 12, and teacher and parent forms. Full-length forms run 35 to 41 items and take about 20 minutes; short forms are 12 items and take about 5 minutes. PAR describes the full or short forms as suitable for yearly, classwide or schoolwide screening and the short forms as useful for progress monitoring within an RTI model. Qualification level B applies.

Best fit: school psychologists and counselors who want a strengths-based tool with quick short forms for monitoring students in Tier 2.

BASC-3 BESS (Behavioral and Emotional Screening System)

The BESS is different in kind: it screens for behavioral and emotional risk rather than describing SEL competencies. Per Pearson, it was authored by Randy W. Kamphaus and Cecil R. Reynolds and published in 2015, with teacher and parent forms for preschool (ages 3 to 5) and grades K-12 and a student self-report for grades 3 to 12. Forms run 25 to 30 questions and take about 5 to 10 minutes, cover internalizing and externalizing problems as well as prosocial competencies, include validity indexes that flag overly negative or inconsistent ratings, and require qualification level B. Parent and student forms are available in Spanish.

Best fit: districts running mental health risk screening with school psychologist oversight. Because items can touch protected areas, consent planning is essential.

CASEL's SEL Assessment Guide

Rather than an instrument, this is a catalog. K-12 Dive reported at its November 2018 launch that the guide filters assessments by grade level, competency and who administers them, with real-world examples of data use. In The Hechinger Report, CASEL's Jeremy Taylor and RAND's Laura Hamilton describe it as explaining what each assessment measures along with reporting features, training and developer supports, and caution that an SEL assessment should never be the only source of information; pair it with climate and implementation measures.

Side by side

Choosing an instrument

Wisconsin's DPI points schools to the Hexagon Tool, which compares options on need, fit, resources, evidence, usability and capacity. Translated into questions a school team can answer in one meeting:

1. Need: Which competencies do we teach and want to see? If your standards cover all five CASEL competencies, a four-construct survey leaves gaps.
2. Fit: Does the instrument match our grade span and the language needs of our students and families? Several tools above offer Spanish forms; check for others.
3. Resources: What does it cost per student per year, including the platform, training and staff time to administer and score?
4. Evidence: Has the developer published reliability and validity evidence for our grade levels and for the use we intend? Evidence that an instrument predicts outcomes is not the same as evidence it works as a screener.
5. Usability: Can a teacher complete it for 28 students in a prep period? Can a fourth grader read it?
6. Capacity: Who will own administration, data cleaning, reporting and the meetings where results are discussed?

Try this: Pilot the instrument in two or three classrooms for one cycle before buying a district license. Ask the pilot teachers two questions afterward: What did you learn that you did not already know? What did you do differently because of it?

Using assessment to shine a light, not affix a label

The practices below keep SEL assessment on the right side of that line.

• Report strengths first. Tools such as DESSA, SEARS and WCSD-SECA are built around assets. Lead team conversations with what students do well, then move to needs.
• Never let a score alone place a student. A flagged screener result should trigger a conversation with the teacher, a look at attendance and work habits, and often a conversation with the student, before any Tier 2 decision.
• Treat the screener as a hypothesis. Angela Duckworth and David Yeager wrote in Measurement Matters that a handful of self-report or teacher-report items cannot diagnose an individual child, and that measures are context-dependent, so a situational problem can be misattributed to the child.
• Re-screen before escalating. Scores move with the season, the rater and the week's events.
• Decide in advance how data will and will not be used, write it down, and share it with families. CASEL's practitioner guidance, as reported by K-12 Dive, states that screening for deficits is not an appropriate use of SEL assessment tools.
• Debrief with students. Washoe County describes debriefing results with students, families, staff and community as a primary use of its data.
• Keep SEL scores out of report cards, discipline files and teacher evaluation.

Privacy and consent

Two federal laws frame SEL assessment data. FERPA protects education records, meaning records directly related to a student and maintained by the school or a party acting for it. Parents, or students once they turn 18, have the right to inspect records, request amendments and, with exceptions, consent before personally identifiable information is disclosed. If a vendor holds your SEL data, your contract needs to keep that vendor inside FERPA's school-official exception and prevent secondary use.

The Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment applies to surveys, analyses or evaluations administered to students that touch eight protected areas: political affiliations or beliefs; mental or psychological problems of the student or family; sex behavior or attitudes; illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating or demeaning behavior; critical appraisals of close family members; legally recognized privileged relationships; religious practices or beliefs; and income beyond what program eligibility requires. Most SEL competency items, such as "I can calm myself when I am upset," do not fall in these areas. Behavioral and emotional risk screeners may. Have your district's legal counsel review the items, and when in doubt, use active consent.

Practical steps: publish the instrument or a summary of its constructs; explain in one page what the data are for, who sees them, how long they are kept and how to opt out; store identifiable results with the same controls as grades and health records; and report publicly only in aggregate with minimum group sizes.

An implementation sequence for a school year

1. Spring before launch: form a team, agree on purpose, choose two to four competencies and one instrument, and draft the family notice.
2. August: train raters or proctors on a sample so items are interpreted consistently.
3. September to October: administer the baseline, clean the data, and run the first team protocol on school and grade-level results.
4. November to February: adjust Tier 1 instruction, form Tier 2 groups only where multiple sources agree, and monitor those students with a short form.
5. March to April: repeat the administration and compare to baseline within grades and subgroups.
6. May: ask what decisions the data changed, and keep, drop or modify the instrument accordingly.

Common pitfalls

• Buying the platform before naming the purpose.
• Screening without the capacity to respond. A flag with no follow-up is worse than no flag.
• Mixing up risk screening and competency assessment. The BESS and the DESSA answer different questions.
• Ignoring implementation data. If scores are flat, check whether the lessons were taught before concluding they failed.

The bottom line on SEL assessment

Pick the purpose, then the tool. Keep the stakes low and the conversations frequent, and use the results to change what adults do on Monday. For the measurement debate, including reference bias and the CORE Districts' experience, see Measuring MESH. For meeting protocols that turn scores into decisions, see Data-Informed SEL.