Social and emotional learning (SEL) advocates always insist that their enterprise is “evidence-based.” There is, in truth, remarkably little rigorous evidence demonstrating SEL’s academic benefits. A 2017 Rand Corporation
review
of the SEL literature found a single study meeting its highest threshold for evidentiary rigor demonstrating positive academic achievement effects. But what SEL advocates lack in quality, they make up in quantity. There have been a great many studies of non-cognitive interventions that have shown results, and occasionally academics group these studies together into a meta-analysis alleging to prove that SEL “works.”
The latest such
study
, published last month, reviewed 424 studies involving a total of over half a million students. Unlike previous meta-analyses, the authors do not offer a list of studies to facilitate spot-checking (an exercise…
