Measuring What Matters: Growth Mindset You Can See
How schools can track social-emotional growth in ways that guide teaching instead of just filling a spreadsheet
School leaders can tell you their attendance rate, their reading scores and how many students are on track to graduate. Ask how many students are more willing to take on a hard problem than they were in September, and the answer is usually a shrug.
That gap matters. Persistence, self-talk and the willingness to try again after a mistake shape how students learn every day. If those skills are part of a school’s mission, they deserve to be seen, tracked and talked about with the same care as academic data. The good news is that it doesn’t require a complicated system. It requires a clear purpose and a few well-chosen tools.
Why these skills are worth measuring
The case for paying attention to social-emotional growth is strong. A landmark meta-analysis by Joseph Durlak, Roger Weissberg and colleagues, published in Child Development in 2011, reviewed 213 school-based social and emotional learning programs involving 270,034 students. Students in those programs showed better social and emotional skills, attitudes and behavior, along with fewer conduct problems and less emotional distress.
They also did better academically. Compared with peers, participating students “scored 11 percentile points higher on standardized achievement tests.” Social-emotional skills aren’t a distraction from learning. They’re part of what makes learning possible.
If these skills drive outcomes, knowing whether they’re growing is a reasonable thing for a school to want.
Start with the decision, not the tool
The challenge is rarely a lack of options. The RAND Corporation’s Assessment Finder lists more than 200 assessments of interpersonal, intrapersonal and higher-order cognitive skills. With that many choices, the most important question comes first: what decision will this information help us make?
In 2018, RAND and CASEL’s Assessment Work Group published a guide for school and district leaders, Choosing and Using SEL Competency Assessments. It walks through the benefits and challenges of measuring these skills, what to consider when choosing a tool, and how to use the results in practice. The message running through it is that assessment is useful when it informs what adults do next: how they teach, coach and support students.
A school that wants to know whether a new advisory routine is working needs different information than a school planning professional development for next year. Naming the purpose first keeps measurement from becoming paperwork.
Measure strengths, not deficits
How a school measures social-emotional growth also shapes how students experience it. CASEL’s SEL Assessment Guide encourages tools that emphasize student strengths, an approach it says in turn promotes positive development. As K-12 Dive reported in summarizing the guide, screening for deficits is not an appropriate use of SEL assessment tools.
That’s an important guardrail. The goal isn’t to label students or sort them. It’s to notice growth, build on what’s working and adjust when something isn’t.
What growth mindset looks like when you can see it
Growth mindset is easier to observe than many leaders expect. Teachers, coaches and after-school staff see it every day in behaviors like these:
A student chooses the harder version of a task when given a choice.
A student recovers after a mistake and tries again without being prompted.
A student uses language like “not yet” or “I can try another way.”
A student sticks with a challenge longer than they did a month ago.
A student encourages a classmate who is struggling.
None of these require a test. They require adults who know what to look for and a simple way to write it down. A short checklist on a clipboard, a monthly note in a shared document, or a quick tally at the end of a class period is often enough to see a trend. The key is consistency: the same few behaviors, observed the same way, over time.
Don’t forget the hours after the bell
Students don’t only grow between first period and dismissal. Coaches, after-school staff and community partners often see students in settings with lower stakes and more room to take risks, where persistence and teamwork are easy to observe. When those adults use the same short list of behaviors as teachers, schools get a fuller picture of each student, and students hear a consistent message about what growth looks like across their whole day.
A simple plan any school can start
Pick three or four observable behaviors tied to your school’s values, like the list above.
Use more than one lens. Combine a short student self-report at the start and end of a term with brief staff observations each month.
Include student voice. A two-question reflection (“What was hard this week? What did you do?”) tells you what students are noticing about themselves.
Look at trends together. Review results with teachers and partners, including after-school staff who see students in a different setting.
Share what you learn. Families and students should hear about growth, not just scores.
Questions to ask before you choose a tool
What decision will this information help us make?
Does the tool focus on strengths and growth rather than deficits?
Is it appropriate for the ages we serve?
Who will collect it, and how much time will it take?
How will we share results with teachers, families and students?
Seeing what you value
Schools tend to improve what they pay attention to. When leaders make social-emotional growth visible, with clear purpose, a strengths-based lens and a few honest measures, they send a message to staff and students alike: effort, persistence and resilience count here. And what counts gets better.
Sources
Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., Dymnicki, A. B., Taylor, R. D., & Schellinger, K. B. (2011). The impact of enhancing students’ social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Development, 82(1), 405–432. CASEL summary
Taylor, J. J., Buckley, K., Hamilton, L. S., Stecher, B. M., Read, L., & Schweig, J. (2018). Choosing and Using SEL Competency Assessments: What Schools and Districts Need to Know. RAND Corporation and CASEL. rand.org
CASEL. SEL Assessment Guide, as reported in “SEL assessment guide a one-stop shop for real-world examples.” K-12 Dive. k12dive.com
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