AILSA CHANG, HOST:
There's been some debate about whether schools should teach not just academic skills, like how to read or solve an equation, but also social and emotional skills, like how to manage your big feelings. Now, a new peer-reviewed analysis out of Yale University offers a clear answer, as NPR's Cory Turner reports.
CORY TURNER, BYLINE: Social and emotional learning, known by the acronym SEL, has been on researchers' radar for years.
CHRIS CIPRIANO: So what does it feel like to feel anxious and how to support your anxiety when you're about to take that test?
TURNER: Chris Cipriano is one of the researchers behind this new review. She's an associate professor at the Yale Child Study Center. Another important skill in the SEL toolbox?
CIPRIANO: How we understand and communicate with one another towards the end of making friends and growing relationships.
TURNER: Cipriano says this new review gathered up 40 previous studies that allowed researchers to see specifically, does universal access to social and emotional learning appear to help kids academically too? She says yes. Kids who got regular SEL saw improvement in both test scores and grades.
CIPRIANO: And then, even one step further, looking at the domains of ELA and math, we further found significant effects.
TURNER: That ELA, or English language arts, achievement went up by more than six percentile points, and math achievement improved by about four points. The report came out earlier this month in the Review of Educational Research. Best of all, they found kids who were in an SEL program for an entire school year saw their overall academic achievement improve nearly a full grade.
CIPRIANO: So we're really speaking about the difference between a C and a B, and a B and an A.
TURNER: Cipriano says these new results back up something brain scientists have long known, that cognition and emotion are inextricably tied together and helping kids with the latter can make the former a whole lot easier.
Cory Turner, NPR News.
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