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Debate: Should We Collect and Track Social-Emotional Data?

We know that students’ sense of well-being, ability to remain focused, persistence, and other non-cognitive factors have a significant impact on their learning. The more confident, engaged, and persistent students are, the more they are likely to learn.

While not measured on most formal and standardized assessments, these are important learning-related elements. In fact, these social-emotional factors, in addition to others, can influence whether learning occurs just as much as academic background and learning skills do.

Educators have always paid attention to student attitudes, emotional states, and related factors to understand why students may or may not be learning. When students fail to learn, we typically include social-emotional elements in our search for the cause.

Social-emotional learning (SEL) has gained even greater attention recently. In fact, several surveys of educators have placed SEL among the areas needing highest priority attention in the aftermath of the pandemic. Most schools have introduced some type of SEL program or SEL activities over the past few years.

However, evaluating whether SEL is making a difference in learning outcomes remains a challenge. We can attempt to understand the status of social-emotional skills and their influence on the learning of students by surveying to learn their experience and perceptions. We may observe students about whom we have concerns, or we may even engage students in conversation to learn how they are feeling and how their social-emotional state and related skills are influencing their ability to learn.

We know this information is important, but we do not always have current, accurate information upon which to rely to make decisions. Furthermore, the absence of what might be considered “objective data” is often criticized when people challenge the effectiveness of SEL efforts. So, what if we had access to this information in near real time for all our students? Increasingly, we do.

Researchers and developers have been working for years to create and refine tools to harvest this information using technology. By monitoring keystrokes, eye movements, and even facial expressions, technology can capture information about an individual’s focus, engagement, and understanding. Indicators such as the content students choose to view, how long they view that content, and if they struggle and become stuck can provide information about persistence, problem solving, decision making, and other skills and behaviors.

Obviously, this information holds the potential to inform educators, guide instructional strategies, and track trends and progress. It also raises significant questions about the extent to which collecting information in this manner invades the privacy of students, especially if they are not fully aware that the information is being collected, analyzed, and reported. However, as the focus on social-emotional skills and learning receives increasing attention, popularity, and focus, openness to collecting and using this type of information has also grown.

Once again, technology is challenging us to consider what information can be collected and used versus what information should be collected and how it should be used. Obviously, such information could be abused and cause harm to students, but it also holds the potential to provide feedback to learners, position educators to intervene early when students struggle, and build students’ social-emotional skills where needed.

The questions are hard, and the answers are not easy. Like technology development in other areas, ethical dilemmas accompany opportunities. We need to ask:

Are the rewards significant enough to outweigh potential dangers?
Is informing students and families enough to satisfy ethical considerations?
Should students and families be able to opt out of social-emotional data collection?
Who will retain this information, and how can we avoid having the information used to judge, assign potential, and classify students without their knowledge and control?

Every week, it seems that technology opens new doors, poses new questions, and presents new challenges for us to consider. Now more than ever, we must be clear and critical in our thinking, guided by our values, and centered on the best interests of our students.

Standardized Test Scores May Not Mean What You Think

Student Learning, Thinking Frames

June 01, 2023

Standardized Test Scores May Not Mean What You Think

Standardized tests have been a staple of American education for generations. They play a role in determining everything from student retention and acceleration to assignment for remediation services and eligibility for gifted classes. They influence academic awards and post-secondary scholarships. Standardized test scores can even determine state-assigned grades for school rankings and make or break school reputations.

Given the high-stakes consequences associated with standardized test scores, we might assume that these assessments provide an accurate and comprehensive measure of learning performance and potential, offer predictive power for future success, and reflect equitable opportunities for learners regardless of background, economic status, and culture. We might think that schools with high test scores must be particularly effective, while schools with lower scores must be deficient in some important ways and thus deserve shame, blame, and intervention.

Yet, when we consider how standardized tests are constructed and administered, what they are designed to measure, and what their results can offer, a very different picture emerges. Let’s explore five ways in which learners, our communities, and we ourselves can be misled by over-reliance on test scores as measures of learning, performance, and potential.

First, standardized tests are designed to capture narrow information about certain academic knowledge and skills. While they can provide some information on student knowledge in subjects such as math, science, and English, standardized tests do not measure other important areas of knowledge and skill; they typically ignore student abilities to solve complex problems, think creatively and critically, or show artistic ability. Yet these areas of knowledge, skill, and potential are highly valued and necessary for success in future careers—and life itself.

Second, year-to-year comparisons of test scores typically do not reflect learning growth, as they do not compare the same group of students from one year to the next. Consequently, shifts upward or downward in grade-level scores are comparisons to the performance of the previous year’s group of test takers, so while the test questions may reflect consistent grade-level learning expectations, different students are responding to them. Year-to-year comparisons alone tell us little about how the learning of any group of students is growing, static, or falling behind.

Third, standardized test score comparisons can mask the work of some effective schools and overstate the performance of other, less effective schools. Typically, schools in more affluent areas attain higher test scores. Not surprisingly, the students they serve typically come from families that have a history of success in formal education and are able to equip their students with robust background knowledge and experience. Test scores in these schools can be as heavily influenced by what students bring with them to school as by their school experience. Meanwhile, schools serving less advantaged students may be generating higher rates of learning but are still achieving lower test scores. In fact, a recent study conducted at Stanford University found that when test scores were compared with a focus on the amount of student learning growth generated, lower-scoring schools in large metropolitan school districts frequently demonstrated more learning growth than schools serving more affluent and advantaged students in suburbs and elsewhere.

Fourth, efforts to build students’ learning engagement, ownership, independence, and efficacy are rarely measured by standardized tests. Yet, these skills can have a determinative influence on students’ ability and commitment to be lifelong learners in addition to heavily influencing their success beyond formal education. As students are focused on developing these key learning and life skills, their standardized test scores often do not grow as rapidly as those of students in learning environments with a heavy focus on test scores, even though over time their learning may serve them far better.

Fifth, standardized test scores are not highly predictive of future college success. In fact, grade point average (GPA) is a far better predictor of the likelihood that students will succeed in higher education than the most popular college entrance exams. A recent study involving Chicago Public School students found that GPAs are five times stronger predictors of college success than the test scores on which colleges have relied for decades.

Standardized tests can play a role in collecting and reporting information about student academic performance, but they are far from infallible, and they rarely offer a comprehensive picture of what and how well students are learning. Obviously, there is a need to reduce our reliance on scores associated with standardized tests. We also need to broaden our perspective and begin collecting more learning-related information to gain a more complete—and more accurate—picture of how our students are learning and growing.

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