A Toolkit for Identifying and Assessing Socially Rejected Children

Key Outcomes: The main features of the assessment and outcomes of the validation study are as follows:

• SELweb's modules reflect a four-factor model of social and emotional learning consisting of emotion recognition, social perspective taking, social problem solving, and self-control (McKown, 2019; McKown et al., 2016).
• SELweb is reliable and valid for ethnically and socioeconomically diverse children in grades K to 3 (McKown, 2019; McKown et al., 2016; Dunya, McKown, and Smith, 2019).

Measure: SELweb is a web-based toolkit of SEL assessments that can be completed within 30 minutes. The toolkit can be used flexibly and in conjunction with existing assessments to conduct efficient universal two-stage screening for social rejection and diagnostic assessment of factors that contribute to social rejection. This information can then be used to inform individualized intervention planning.

SELweb includes

• a universal screener to identify children who are socially rejected
• a set of assessments that are easy to administer, score, and interpret that efficiently diagnose SEL processing deficits for children who screen positive for social rejection
• a set of assessments that lend themselves to the development of educational treatment and service plans to address each child's specific needs

SELweb assessments are meant to be used in conjunction with, not in place of, other well-established instruments that are well-suited to assessing children's social behavior. SELweb includes assessments of four SEL skills related to social functioning: nonverbal awareness, “mind sharing” (perspective taking), social problem-solving, and self-regulation. The nonverbal awareness task evaluates children's ability to identify others' emotions from photographs of faces varying in intensity of facial expressions. A second assessment (the pictorial theory of mind task) is intended to reduce language demands of typical theory of mind tasks and enable a more accurate evaluation of children's ability to infer others' mental states (mind sharing). A third assessment evaluates children's ability to engage in effective social problem-solving. A final set of assessments evaluates children's ability to self-regulate.

Research Design and Methods: In phase 1, the researchers developed an item pool for each SEL skill and conducted an initial item tryout to evaluate administration procedures. In parallel, they also developed the web-based software platform for delivery of the assessments. For phase 2, SELweb was co-administered to children along with other direct assessments of SEL skills and parent and teacher ratings of social competence to ascertain reliability and validity. Relying on the analytic findings from phase 1 and 2, a panel of experts on children's social development and assessment helped develop standards of impairment so that SEL assessments can be used for secondary screening of social rejection. The researchers used phase 3 data  to confirm the psychometric properties of the SELweb and guide development of preliminary norms.