Responding to our call for deeper insight into how socioemotional skills develop, this project leverages longitudinal data from a California school district serving 27,000 students to generate novel estimates of how social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies—as defined by the CASEL framework—change across multiple years for individual students, moving beyond traditional point‑in‑time snapshots to produce growth measures of SEL development. Using student‑level trajectories from grades 7 to 9, the team will model how competencies such as self‑awareness, self‑management, and relationship skills evolve and examine how these developmental patterns predict early mobility‑relevant outcomes, including absenteeism, academic performance, advanced course taking, and on‑time high school graduation. By comparing growth‑based SEL indicators with static measures and assessing whether they more accurately capture student development across racial and socioeconomic groups, the study aims to improve the precision and usefulness of SEL measurement for districts seeking to understand and support skills tied to long‑run educational and economic opportunity.

Data Sources 

• Data: CASEL measures of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making, educational administrative data, and school climate data
• Early Mobility Outcomes: Chronic absenteeism, academic performance, advanced course taking, and on-time high school graduation