Social-emotional learning programs can boost students’ academic performances, but a recent analysis found that program length matters when it comes to how much.
Researchers from the Yale School of Medicine analyzed 40 studies on SEL programs that included data from more than 33,700 students in first through 12th grade. They found that students who participated in SEL programs saw improved academic performance no matter their grade level or whether their performance was measured with GPA or standardized test scores.
The report builds upon a 2023 Yale analysis of social-emotional learning research that dove into more than 400 pieces of research on the effectiveness of SEL. Christina Cipriano, associate professor in Yale’s Child Study Center,
“When we put out the initial meta-analysis in 2023, we were getting asked lots of questions around the academic achievement benefits of social-emotional learning,” Cipriano says, “and we really wanted to go deep and to understand, what does the data say specifically about academic achievement outcomes to be expected from social-emotional learning programs?”
Cipriano says that across the research she and her colleagues reviewed, students’ academic performance increased by an average of 4 percentage points if they were part of an SEL program. Academic performance improved by 8 percentage points with SEL programs that were a full academic year.
When broken out by subject, literacy achievement increased by about 6.3 percentage points and math achievement increased by 3.8 percentage points.
“The nerd in me is like, that makes sense from a developmental standpoint, because cognition and emotions are inextricably tied in your brain,” Cipriano explains. “If you can have a student sitting in a third grade classroom, they could be learning the best possible math curriculum from the best possible teacher. But if that student is feeling anxious or embarrassed or frustrated or nervous, they are not available to learn. They are not able to access the awesomeness of that curriculum.”
Social-emotional learning teaches the skills and strategies that students need to identify and manage their emotions, she says, which makes them better decision-makers and puts them in a good mental state to learn.
“How to take a deep breath or calm your nerves, all the different positive self-talk — that’s what they learn in explicit SEL instruction,” Cipriano says. “That makes them better learners, and that’s why we were really excited about this paper and these analyses. It’s demonstrated on a number of different dimensions across the whole body of what we have available in experimental evaluations of social and emotional learning.”
The results come at a time when SEL is under fire from conservative groups, much like critical race theory and books that include LGBTQ+ characters or topics. The report notes that SEL programs in schools “are experiencing several mounting challenges to implementation.”
The data is part of a larger report by the researchers on the “state of the evidence” about the effectiveness of social-emotional learning, which included research from 2008 to 2020. Only about 17 percent of that research included academic achievement data at the time, and Cipriano says she and her colleagues are pleased that the research community responded to their call for the inclusion of more academic outcomes data in the years since.
Cipriano says researchers are excited to release an additional SEL analysis in a few weeks that includes data through 2023, which will give readers a look at how SEL programs affected academic achievement during the peak years of the COVID-19 pandemic. They plan to update the data and their analysis every six months. The current analysis covers 2008 to 2020.
That new batch of data will be important, she says, because students lost the opportunity to organically grow SEL skills during quarantine. Day-to-day events like talking to friends in the school hallway or having disagreements with friends help students develop those skills.
“Basic relationships and interactions were no longer accidental and could not be left to chance,” Cipriano says, “so there was a need for explicit structures and then instruction to meet students where they are, and make sure that all students have the opportunity to have those healthy forms of development and engagement.”
