Educators and educational support staff are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of systematic efforts to support students’ social and emotional growth. Logically, the success of social-emotional learning programs depends upon the ability of educators to assess student’s ability to process and utilize social-emotional information and use data to guide programmatic revisions. Therefore, the purpose of the current examination was to provide evidence of the structural validity of the Social-Emotional Learning Scale (SELS), a freely available measure of social-emotional learning, within Grades 6 to 12. Students (N = 289, 48% female, 43.35% male, 61% Caucasian) completed the SELS and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Confirmatory factor analyses of the SELS failed to support a multidimensional factor structure identified in prior investigations. The results of an exploratory factor analysis suggest a reduced 16-item version of the SELS captures a unidimensional social-emotional construct. Furthermore, our results provide evidence of the internal consistency and concurrent validity of the reduced-length version of the instrument. Our discussion highlights the implications of the findings to social and emotional learning educational efforts and promoting evidence-based practice.

教育工作者和教育支持人员越来越意识到，为支持学生的社交和情感发展做出系统性努力的重要性。从逻辑上讲，社会情感学习计划的成功取决于教育者评估学生处理和利用社会情感信息以及使用数据指导程序修订的能力。因此，当前检查的目的是提供社会情绪学习量表（SELS），社会情感学习的一个免费提供的措施的结构效度证据，等级在6到12名学生（ñ= 289，女性为48％，男性为43.35％，白种人为61％）完成了SELS和优势与困难问卷。SELS的验证性因素分析未能支持先前研究中确定的多维因素结构。探索性因素分析的结果表明，简化的SELS的16个项目版本捕获了一维的社会情感构造。此外，我们的结果提供了仪器长度减小版本的内部一致性和并发有效性的证据。我们的讨论着重指出了研究结果对社会和情感学习教育努力以及促进循证实践的意义。