A meta-analysis of effective social-emotional learning programs in Pre-K-12 classrooms: disentangling the critical role of curriculum-based approaches in promoting students’ social emotional skills

This article presents the findings of a review of the effects of universal school-based social emotional learning (SEL) programs on the social emotional development of Pre-K-12 students, and explores the relationship between effect sizes and other methodological and substantive features. Unlike previous reviews, the current review employed a more stringent inclusion criterion to select only studies with high methodological quality. The final sample consisted of 59 studies in total involving 62,581 participants. The results showed that SEL programs had a significant effect on students’ social emotional skills (ES = 0.18). The results of univariate subgroup analysis and meta-regression found that sample size, duration, and intervention approach were significantly related to the effectiveness of SEL programs. In particular, comprehensive and curriculum-based SEL programs had significant and promising effect sizes (ES = 0.21; ES = 0.20), whereas supplemental SEL programs had an insignificant and negligible effect (ES = 0.07), encouraging schools to implement SEL as a regular curriculum to cultivate the social emotional development of students. However, other methodological features (i.e., research design, grade level, socioeconomic status, report type, and publication year) were not statistically significant. Policy and practical implications are discussed.