In this CASEL Measuring SEL blog, James Soland shares how work with Santa Ana Unified School District led to new insights on how item response times and test metadata may provide insight into student SEL.

In this study, we examine whether behaviors indicative of academic disengagement like chronic absenteeism and course failures are related to behaviors indicative of test disengagement like rapidly guessing on items.

In this study we conducted a literature review to investigate whether assessment metadata (typically data relevant to how students behave on a test or survey) can provide information on SEL constructs. Implications of this new source of SEL data for practice, policy, and research are discussed.

This study uses an analytic example to explore whether metadata might help illuminate such constructs. Specifically, analyses examine whether the amount of time students spend on test items (after accounting for item difficulty and estimates of true achievement), and difficult items in particular, tell us anything about the student’s academic motivation and self‐efficacy.

In this study, multivariate models that jointly estimate growth in achievement and self-efficacy during middle school are used to see how underlying developmental processes relate for ELLs.

Learn more about the relationship between self-efficacy and the persistence of achievement gaps for English Language Learners.

New research shows that test effort differs substantially across student gender and racial subgroups. What does this mean for achievement gap estimates?