Academic researchers are collecting evidence for what high-quality SEL programs deliver for students, according to an article in The Hechinger Report. The latest study by researchers at Yale University summarizes 12 years of evidence, from 2008 to 2020, and finds that 30 different SEL programs, which put themselves through 40 rigorous evaluations involving almost 34,000 students, tended to produce “moderate” academic benefits.
The meta-analysis calculated that grades and test scores of students in SEL classes improved by about 4 percentile points, on average, compared with students who didn’t receive soft-skill instruction. Reading gains were larger (more than 6 percentile points) than math gains (fewer than 4 percentile points). Longer-duration SEL programs, extending more than four months, produced double the academic gains — more than 8 percentile points.
“Social emotional learning interventions are not designed, most of the time, to explicitly improve academic achievement,” says Christina Cipriano, one of the study’s authors and an associate professor at Yale Medical School’s Child Study Center. “And yet we demonstrated, through our meta-analytic report, that explicit social emotional learning improved academic achievement and it improved both GPA and test scores.”
The academic boost from SEL in this 2025 paper is smaller than the 11 percentile points documented in an earlier 2011 meta-analysis summarizing research through 2007, when SEL had not yet gained widespread popularity in schools. The educational landscape has since changed. More than 80 percent of principals of K-12 schools said their schools used an SEL curriculum during the 2023-24 school year, according to a survey by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and the RAND Corporation.
The Yale researchers only studied a small subset of the SEL market, programs that subjected themselves to a rigorous evaluation and included academic outcomes. Three-quarters of the 40 studies were randomized-controlled trials, similar to pharmaceutical trials, where schools or teachers were randomly assigned to teach an SEL curriculum. The remaining studies, in which schools or teachers volunteered to participate, still had control groups of students so that researchers could compare the academic gains of students who did not receive SEL instruction.
The SEL programs in the Yale study taught a wide range of soft skills, from mindfulness and anger management to resolving conflicts and setting goals. It is unclear which soft skills drive academic gains — an area for future research.
“Developmentally, when we think about what we know about how kids learn, emotional regulation is really the driver,” says Cipriano. “No matter how good that curriculum or that math program or reading curriculum is, if a child is feeling unsafe or anxious or stressed out or frustrated or embarrassed, they’re not available to receive the instruction, however great that teacher might be.”
Effective programs give students tools to cope with stressful situations, she says. Think of the effect of a pop quiz from a student’s perspective, she says. “You can recognize, ‘I’m feeling nervous, my blood is rushing to my hands or my face, and I can use my strategies of counting to 10, thinking about what I know, and use positive self-talk to be able to regulate, to be able to take my test’,” she explains.
The strongest evidence for SEL is in elementary school, where most evaluations have been conducted (two-thirds of the 40 studies). For young students, SEL lessons tend to be short but frequent, for example, 10 minutes a day. There’s less evidence for middle and high school SEL programs because they haven’t been studied as much. Preteens and teens usually have less frequent but longer sessions, a half hour or even 90 minutes, weekly or monthly.
Schools don’t need to spend “hours and hours” on social and emotional instruction to see academic benefits, Cipriano says. A current trend is to incorporate or embed social and emotional learning within academic instruction, as part of math class, for example.
Sales pitches from SEL vendors swamp educators. A half dozen market research firms put the SEL market size above $2 billion annually. Cipriano says school leaders can ask questions about which specific skills the SEL program claims to foster, whether those skills will help the district achieve its goals, such as improving school climate, and whether the program has been externally evaluated.
“Districts invest in things all the time that are flashy and pretty, across content areas, not just SEL,” says Cipriano. “It may never have had an external evaluation but has a really great social media presence and really great marketing.”
Cipriano says parents should be asking questions, too. “Parents should be partners in learning,” she says. “I have four kids, and I want to know what they’re learning about in school.”
SEL critics contend that these programs force educators to be therapists and teachers should stick to academics. The Yale paper rejects the therapy versus academic dichotomy by suggesting that emotions, social interaction and academics are interlinked. Before criticizing all SEL programs, educators and parents should consider the evidence.
The Hechinger Report
