Students who were exposed to social-emotional learning in preschool are more likely to have higher well-being when they reach young adulthood, a new longitudinal study reveals.
SEL is the process of teaching students non-academic skills related to things like emotional management, cooperation, and relationship-building. Many teachers, school leaders, and district leaders (47%) say it’s had a “somewhat positive” effect on students’ academic and social skills, according to an EdWeek Research Center survey done earlier this year.
Published in the journal American Psychologist last week, the study looked at 192 students who were a part of Head Start classrooms and participated in a research-based, developmentally informed (REDI) program, which scaffolded SEL skills into teaching and student learning. These students were compared to 164 students who were in a Head Start program but were not exposed to the REDI program. The students were identified in the fall of 2003 and 2004.
Both groups of children, all of whom came from low-income families, were surveyed over the course of two decades, with researchers publishing the most recent data of the students at 21 and 22 years old.
The study identified 11 categories used as measurements of well-being: conduct problems, hyperactivity, emotional symptoms, depression, loneliness, empathy, sociability, emotional support, the number of days they felt good enough to do usual activities, life satisfaction, and a sense of security and belonging.
Students with exposure to SEL programming in preschool scored better on 7 of the 11 measurements.The other measurements—hyperactivity, emotional symptoms, sociability, and a sense of security and belonging—had no detected differences between the groups.
There is “potential long-term power of investing more in enriching existing preschool interventions—especially those serving children from low-income families—with more explicit and comprehensive support for social-emotional development and language development,” said Karen Bierman, a professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University and the lead author of the study.
Education Week spoke with Bierman about what her findings add to the larger body of research around SEL and what educators can take away from the results.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is the REDI program?
At the time, Head Start focused primarily on building strong relationships and a framework for how teachers could go about setting up their day, and REDI brought in a stronger scaffold of daily activities that teachers were then able to use and build on to enhance these skills.
We understood that social-emotional development was an important domain, especially for children who had faced early adversities. The focus was primarily on relationship building—which is still central and important to social-emotional development—but there was also this emerging research about the importance of building language skills to understand and talk about feelings, recognize feelings, and use language to identify problems that students were facing.
What did the REDI professional development look like for teachers?
The REDI program added a platform for teaching more skills in the classroom. We used the preschool Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS) curriculum in the classroom, which was taught twice a week. It introduces ideas about friendship skills, understanding feelings (your own and others), solving social problems effectively, and managing your feelings—all very normative skills that preschool children are learning.
We also had an interactive reading program where every single day in the classroom, teachers read a story that was aligned with whatever skill they were working on in PATHS, and so that provided teachers a scaffold to build from.
Then we had professional development that was focused more on how to interact with children in ways that would help them use those skills that were being taught and use language effectively all through the day as they were interacting with the teacher and other children.
It was not a huge addition to Head Start, but it was this pivotal scaffolding for teachers in how to get that focus on their minds every day, and then different strategies that teachers could use to leverage the lessons during their actual interactions and relationships with the children.
What is something that surprised you about the study’s results?
I’m a bit surprised to see the effect size that we saw after so many years. Lots of things are happening in these young people’s lives—these were kids who survived the COVID experience when they were just finishing high school.
Some of the kids are doing additional school or training after high school. Many of them are transitioned into work. A lot of them are doing some part-time school and working. That is a big transition for all children. But when you are a young adult and your family has a lot of resources, they’re much more able to support that transition and that shift to being a more independent and self-sufficient adult.
Most of the children in our study weren’t coming from advantaged backgrounds, and that puts much more pressure on them to figure out how they are going to be financially solvent, and how they are going to find a job that is satisfying. The whole transition into creating positive relationships and managing those—that’s hard for all young adults.
There’s a lot of research on social-emotional learning. How do you think this study adds to that?
What’s really valuable about this study is having a very rigorous demonstration of how the benefits do cascade over time. We have some longitudinal studies of social-emotional learning programs, but most of them are maybe one, two, or three years.
Additionally, this also highlights how the preschool period is an excellent time to really enrich support. It gets a little harder as children move on because schools have so many responsibilities for academic teaching.
What do you think educators can take away from this study?
In the early years when we were working with Head Start teachers, we also collected ratings from them. We had some qualitative interviews with them. What the teachers liked the most was the scaffolding of the social-emotional support, and how these guidelines and lessons allowed them to feel more supported and effective in taking those lessons and making them their own.
In the first year of implementing the program, teachers felt overwhelmed. Teaching is a hard job, and so suddenly they get a whole bunch of new stuff—that is a challenging experience.
But after that first year, once they were familiar with the lessons and the activities, teachers really took on the strategies, and they were very innovative. They were very creative in how to adjust them to their particular kids that they had in their classroom. They came up with lots of creative ways to make the program more their own.