Evaluating Mental Health and Social-Emotional Learning

As Mental Health Month is ending, let us take a moment to reflect, celebrate progress, and recommit to systems that support our participants’ well-being year-round. Programs focused on Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) build internal competencies, social responsibility, and interpersonal awareness. Many leaders increasingly recognize that lifelong success depends on developing social-emotional skills and taking care of mental health.

Measuring SEL and mental health initiatives is essential to ensure programming produces meaningful benefits, guides continuous improvement, and justifies continued investment. Although we know participants are positively affected by these efforts, translating numbers and narratives into measurable growth can be challenging. The long-term success of Social Emotional Learning and mental health initiatives depends on thoughtful, practical evaluation strategies. Effective assessment is not a one-time process, but an ongoing approach that helps program leaders refine practices, measure growth, and demonstrate lasting impact.

We evaluate SEL to:

• Demonstrate impact on the success of our program through usable frameworks

• Improve implementation to identify what is working and where the gaps are

• Inform scale-up and organizational decisions

So, what metrics reflect participants' growth?

1. Social-emotional competencies and Mental Health Indicators

• Being → Emotional

• Doing → Cognition

• Relating → Interpersonal Skills

2.  As it relates to the:

• Individual

• Program

• The Community

SEED Impact developed the SEED Competency Ladders™ to assist organizations in defining their metric milestones, creating customized assessment tools, and providing a customized-designed report for your organization. SEED's approach is drawn from The Building Blocks for Learning, a framework for comprehensive student development, widely used to promote evidence-based skills and mindsets for success in school and life.

SOURCE: Building Blocks for Learning: A Framework for Comprehensive Student Development, K. Brooke Stafford-Brizard, Ph.D., Turnaround for Children, 2016.

Youth Gotta Believe customized the SEED Competency Ladders to specifically measure the therapeutic goals of their Adoption Competent Mental Health Program.  Their 2024 Impact Report* demonstrated that both youth, parents, and families had stronger mental health outcomes as a result of their programs:

For example, overall, youth grew 11% across three domains: Confidence, Skills & Connections (Being, Doing, & Relating)

To explore ways your program can measure SEL and demonstrate mental health outcomes, book a free discovery call with us. 

*You Gotta Believe received special recognition from their funder Impact 100 for their report!