SEL Assessment and Monitoring

The SCII provides you with a brief profile of your student of concern in five sociocultural areas: acculturation, cognitive learning style, culture & language, experiential background, and sociolinguistic development. This needs based checklist addresses the standard exclusionary clause for referrals. That is, if you can show that the student's home background, socioeconomic status, past education experiences, are the primary cause of the child's learning and behavior problems, if you can account for all of his or her problems by evidence of these factors and not something else, then the referral should be to other services, not special education. 

The second edition of the Resiliency Checklist (RCII) is a screening tool for educators in American and Canadian public schools to identify and profile resiliency factors in learners from a culturally or linguistically diverse background. The RCII profiles five specific strength or resiliency areas: acculturation, cognitive learning style, culture & language, experience background, and sociolinguistic development. 

Every child has strengths. It should be common practice to conduct a strengths inventory on every student in your school. While there are several inventories on the market that help assess strengths, you may also choose to do your own inventory on your own or with colleagues. Here is a simple strengths inventory that is not only easy to use, but extremely informative. Information provided from a strengths inventory can help with student regulation, inform behavior plans, and drive intervention strategies.

Using the AQS III will help school personnel better meet the needs of diverse students. Although acculturation is a natural process of adaptation to a new cultural and social environment, there are various side effects to the process that can be stressful for the adapting student, sometimes called “culture shock.” Culture shock is a confounding factor for students learning English as an additional language or learning Standard English within an academic environment. Culture shock is also a factor in the school achievement of students from marginalized communities. Since students acculturate to new environments at different rates it is often difficult to tell who is still experiencing culture shock and who is not. The AQS III measures the level and rate of acculturation and leads directly to strategies to address culture shock. The AQS III aids in providing appropriate assistance to the student and preventing inaccurate or inappropriate placement or referral to special services. Students who are in the process of adapting to a new culture and social environment may behave in a manner that is similar to students with a learning or behavior disability or other inhibiting factor. The AQS III can be used to monitor the rate of acculturation for your diverse students. Students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds will vary in their rate and level of acculturation to public school culture, but all are affected by various factors. Most diverse students will acculturate gradually over several years and at a steady rate relative to length of time, type and amount of instruction, level of assistance with transition, and other factors measured on the AQS III. Those who do not show change year-to-year may have some unidentified difficulty or be having some other destabilizing stressful experience. These difficulties may be addressed through various strategies within the instructional program. The AQS III helps highlight and identify difficulties that may be addressed by readiness, prevention or instructional intervention approaches. The AQS III can be used as part of any screening and progress monitoring process used in problem solving, such as response to intervention (RTI) or response to instruction and intervention (RTII) programs.

This compendium, published by the University of Illinois-Chicago and CASEL, describes the tools to assess the social and emotional learning of preschool and elementary school students (i.e., five‐ to ten‐year‐olds), along with aspects of the contexts in which they learn and their learning behaviors.