Measuring the development of social-emotional competence using behavioral rating scales in the context of school-based social and emotional learning

Universal progress monitoring of student social-emotional competence (SEC) has increasingly been adopted as part of regular educational practices in the context of schoolwide social and emotional learning (SEL). However, an evidence base has not yet been established on the extent of SEC growth to expect across school years under a multiyear school-based SEL implementation setting. An essential but often overlooked prerequisite when measuring student SEC growth is to examine longitudinal measurement invariance of the assessment tools. To address these gaps, this study first tested the longitudinal measurement invariance of a widely-used teacher-completed behavioral rating scale, and then examined the average SEC growth trajectory of elementary school students under a three-year SEL practice initiative. The data involve six waves of teacher ratings of student SEC, collected for three consecutive years using the DESSA-Mini (N = 1146; Grades K-2 at baseline). Using longitudinal confirmatory factor analysis, this study found no violations of measurement invariance across all six occasions, suggesting that the same construct of SEC was measured across different seasons, raters, and grade levels. Then, using second-order latent growth modeling that did not impose any predetermined shape of growth, this study found that (a) student SEC increased within each year, (b) student SEC decreased over each summer by about a half of the yearly gain, and (c) the rate of yearly growth gradually decreased across years. Implications and limitations of these findings are discussed with suggestions for future research and practices.