ACT Tessera

The ACT Tessera Social and Emotional Learning Assessment System was developed to measure social and emotional skills that are associated with success in school, career, and life. The system can be used by educators to select, develop, and implement programs or interventions to improve these skills in children and adolescents.

Intrapersonal competencies; Interpersonal competencies

Grades 6-12

2018

2016

Student

Digital

93

Likert-type rating scales; situational judgment items; forced-choice items

No information is available in the references reviewed.

English, Japanese, and Spanish

None

No overall scores are reported.

There are five subscores:

• Grit/Responsibility
• Teamwork/Cooperation
• Composure/Resilience
• Curiosity/Ingenuity
• Leadership/Communication Style

A scoring report is provided by ACT.

Score reports classify scores as "developing," "approaching," "demonstrating," and “mastering,” along with example behaviors that are associated with each level for each subscore.

Middle school and high school students in the United States.

MS: Self-report ranged from 0.67 to 0.75; SJT ranged from 0.68 to 0.84; traditional reliability metrics do not apply to FC (ACT, 2018).

For middle school, internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) estimates range from 0.67 to 0.75 for the self-report forms, and 0.68-0.84 for the situational judgment items (ACT, 2018).

For high school, internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) estimates ranged from 0.72 to 0.78 for self-report forms, and 0.63 to 0.86 for the situational judgment items (ACT, 2018).

Evidence based on content

Items were reviewed and mapped to domains by a panel of independent raters (N=5) who were psychology doctoral students or held a Ph.D. in psychology. Raters showed strong agreement in their mapping (greater than or equal to 0.95 agreement as measured by intraclass correlation coefficients) (ACT, 2018).

Evidence based on response processes

No information is available in the references reviewed.

Evidence based on internal structure

Confirmatory factor analysis was used to find support for the intended domains on the self-report form. Results were interpreted to suggest six factors corresponding to the Tessera constructs. For the forced choice items, a multidimensional IRT model was used to find support for six distinct factors. Factor models did not fit for the situational judgment items (ACT, 2018).

Evidence based on relations with other variables

Composite scores based on forced choice, situational judgment, and self-report items for all domains correlated with GPA in both middle school and high school (ACT, 2018).

This measure is also reviewed in the AWG Guide.