While there has been a growing interest among districts and schools to expand their definition of student success to focus on the whole child, many educators still lack the measures needed to prioritize and inform this work.
The CORE Districts, a group of districts in California committed to measuring and supporting an expanded definition of student success, have created a survey to identify the social-emotional strengths and needs for students in grades 4-12. This survey asks students about their perceptions of their own growth mindset, self-efficacy, self-management, and social awareness. Through Transforming Education’s resources and the Assessment Work Group Assessment Guide, the survey is freely accessible to any school or district seeking to administer it.
In this paper, we provide benchmarking data for this survey, including means and standard deviations by grade level, subgroup, and competency, from nearly half a million students in grades 4 through 12 across the CORE districts who took the survey in the 2015-16 school year. These data allow practitioners to compare their aggregated data across grade levels and subgroups for a given scale against the appropriate CORE benchmark data, to support their efforts to make inferences about their students’ social-emotional competency and mindset development. The paper concludes with three concrete ways that practitioners can use benchmark data to target the resources and supports needed most within their schools and districts, drawn from Transforming Education’s work with schools and districts throughout the country.
