Advances in SEL Research

We are happy to share the fall newsletter for the SEL Special Interest Group (SIG). Our SIG is now seven years old, and continues to grow. We now have 229 members—our highest to date! Our membership remains diverse and includes scholars, researchers, program developers, graduate students, and practitioners from colleges, universities, and research organizations around the world. Please share this newsletter with your colleagues and students, and ask them to join so that our SIG can continue to grow among practitioners and policy makers—and become even more diverse. Researchand practice-based knowledge on SEL is growing, as is the appreciation of the importance of SEL among parents, educators, and policy makers. This appreciation of SEL is reflected in policy statements on post-secondary attainment, exclusionary discipline, dropout prevention, youth development and safety, as well as in the many attempts at distilling what we know about SEL and what some, using the language of economists, characterize as “non-cognitive” factors. SEL is being implemented in diverse countries and on every continent except Antarctica (and perhaps there as well, among adults). It is important that our SIG continues to expand to reflect this growth and we continue to incorporate diverse perspectives on SEL. This is a good time to do so, as our business meeting at the annual convention of AERA will attempt to address the growth of SEL over the past two decades as well as its future. This edition of our newsletter features reports of current research and practice in SEL conducted by members of our SIG as well as colleagues in China and other countries across the globe. We would like to thank our newsletter editors, Elise Cappella and Meghan McCormick for assembling and publishing this issue—not an easy task. We also want to thank the contributors who took the time to share their important work. We encourage each of you to submit your work for next fall’s edition of the SEL SIG newsletter.