RAND Education Assessment Finder

Measuring social, emotional, and academic competencies

schoolHappy school kids sitting together on staircase

The RAND Education Assessment Finder is a web-based tool that provides information about assessments of K-12 students’ interpersonal, intrapersonal, and higher-order cognitive competencies. Practitioners, researchers, and policymakers can use it to explore what assessments are available, what they are designed to measure, how they are administered, what demands they place on students and teachers, and what kinds of uses their scores support.

Use the Assessment Finder to Search for Measures

Use the Assessment Finder

To get started, click the "Search for Measures" button below.

Search for Measures

Manuals

User Instructions (PDF)
This downloadable resource provides step-by-step instructions for how to navigate the tool, including example use cases.
Practitioner Guide
Jointly developed with members of the Assessment Work Group, this document provides practical guidance for practitioners who are interested in using student assessments of interpersonal, intrapersonal, and higher-order cognitive competencies to guide their practice.

About the Assessment Finder

Note: The assessment finder is no longer being updated, effective October 2020.

Competency Categories

The assessments reviewed cover a broad range of social, emotional, and academic competencies that go by a variety of names. Several frameworks have been developed to organize these competencies. The team organized the competencies based on a framework described in a 2012 National Research Council Report which specified three broad categories. In addition, we classified each measure using a taxonomy developed by Stephanie Jones and colleagues at the EASEL Lab at Harvard University that includes competency names drawn from all of the major frameworks, and initial searches in the Assessment Finder include all measures that have the same classification.

CASEL AWG and the RAND Education Assessment Finder

The RAND Education Assessment Finder is complemented by the SEL Assessment Guide, developed by the SEL Assessment Work Group (AWG). Both tools both help practitioners learn about measures of social and emotional learning, but they differ in several important ways. The RAND Education Assessment Finder includes measures of interpersonal (i.e., social), intrapersonal (i.e., emotional), and higher-order cognitive competencies, whereas the AWG SEL Assessment Guide includes only the first two of those three categories. In addition, the RAND Education Assessment Finder is intended to provide information about a wide range of measures that have been developed for research purposes as well as for use in practice, including information on the validity and reliability evidence associated with each measure. The SEL Assessment Guide, in comparison, is narrowed to just those measures currently being administered in schools and districts, and it focuses on how the measures can be used instructionally by practitioners.

Funding for This Project

This work was conducted by RAND Education and Labor, a division of the RAND Corporation. Funding to support the work has been provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Wallace Foundation, The Raikes Foundation, the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust, and the Overdeck Family Foundation. These foundations are part of the Funders’ Collaborative for Innovative Measurement (FCIM), a group of 15 private foundations and one federal agency partner, which was created during White House meetings held in 2015 to explore areas for coordination, collaboration, and information sharing that will advance the state of and appropriate usage of interpersonal and intrapersonal measures by educators, policymakers and researchers.