Corey Turner
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Social and emotional learning, known as SEL, includes helping students build a few really important life skills, like how to manage your big feelings, how to understand and communicate with others, and how to make meaningful relationships.
This new analysis gathered up 40 previous studies of SEL and found that kids who got regular social-emotional learning in school saw improvement in both test scores and grades, in literacy and in math.
What's more, the researchers found, when kids were in an SEL program for an entire school year, their overall academic achievement improved by around eight percentile points, or nearly a full grade.
The administration has awarded more than $150 million in grants to dozens of colleges, universities, and nonprofit groups to train K-12 teachers in civics and U.S.
Danielle Allen manages a research lab at Harvard focused on civics education.
She says since World War II, the U.S.
government has prioritized science, technology, and math education.
No surprise, in 2022, only about one in five eighth graders scored proficient in civics, according to federal data.
The data comes from NWEA, a K-12 testing and research organization, and its Spring 2025 MAP Growth Assessment, a suite of tests taken by millions of students in thousands of schools across the U.S.
In reading, students across most grade levels are still performing at or even below pandemic lows.
NWEA said this stagnation is consistent regardless of race, ethnicity, or school poverty level.
In math, the news was only slightly better.
Achievement either held steady or, in some grades, improved slightly, though nearly all grades remain behind the performance levels of kids in those same grades back in 2019.
The data comes from NWEA, a K-12 testing and research organization, and its Spring 2025 MAP Growth Assessment, a suite of tests taken by millions of students in thousands of schools across the U.S.
In reading, students across most grade levels are still performing at or even below pandemic lows.
NWEA said this stagnation is consistent regardless of race, ethnicity, or school poverty level.