Aperture Education, a Riverside Insights company and the leading provider of social-emotional skills assessment and intervention solutions, and Committee for Children, the leading provider of social-emotional curriculum programs in the U.S., announced that they will partner to offer four co-developed assessments to support schools in demonstrating the impact of evidence-based social and emotional programs.
Built from the Aperture DESSA suite, these assessments complement Committee for Children’s Second Step® programs, which are research-based social-emotional learning (SEL) curricula developed to nurture SEL in children’s daily lives, both in and outside of the classroom. By having integrated assessment and curriculum tools, educators can gain valuable insights from reliable, real-time data about instructional effectiveness and the impact of SEL curriculum on students. Aperture’s strengths-based assessments for Second Step are standardized, nationally normed and exceed professional standards for psychometric rigor. They will enable educators in grades K-8 to assess a student’s social and emotional skills in less than five minutes and offer middle school students the ability to self-report. Empowered with their own results, students gain agency to offer a key voice in their learning and development. Educators can access student data in real-time via Aperture’s highly scalable platform, and users will find it easy to navigate between the two company’s offerings. This collaboration ensures that users can access results aligned to program language and appropriately measure skills that are taught through Second Step.
Committee for Children’s research- and evidence-based Second Step programs include SEL curricula for early learning through middle school, with additional offerings for out-of-school time and adults. Second Step programs are used in 45,000 schools across all 50 states and reach 26.9 million children worldwide annually. Second Step helps students build vital skills for success, like effective communication, resilience and problem-solving. Research shows that teaching these life skills has positive, lasting effects on students, including improved academic achievement in areas such as math, reading and writing.
This first-of-its-kind partnership will support district decision making as school budgets are growing tighter and education leaders look to vendors to prove that their products are producing outcomes for students and seek ways to get more value from existing products.
“As schools introduce social-emotional learning into their curriculum, it’s imperative to show how these investments translate into improved outcomes for their students. Years of evidence show how Second Step improves critical life skills and mental wellbeing,” said Riverside Insights CEO Vivek Kartha. “We are proud to collaborate with the Committee for Children and contribute to improving student outcomes by aligning our gold standard DESSA assessments with their world-class curriculum.”
“Our partnership with Aperture enables us to offer our school community partners something they’ve been seeking: a high-quality assessment tool aligned to their Second Step curriculum,” said Committee for Children CEO Andrea Lovanhill. “By bringing easy-to-use, data-driven DESSA assessments to schools using our Second Step programs, teachers and support staff will have access to data that quickly and reliably illustrates whether students are learning the skills taught through the program and growing their competencies, as well as where additional instructional support may be needed. This partnership provides school and district leaders with a validated assessment to identify which classrooms and schools need additional implementation support and gives them a way to evaluate the return on their investment in the Second Step program.”
Source: PR Newswire
