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Psychological Assessment
Social-Emotional Skill Assessment in Children and
Adolescents: Advances and Challenges in Personality,
Clinical, and Educational Contexts
Loes Abrahams, Gina Pancorbo, Ricardo Primi, Daniel Santos, Patrick Kyllonen, Oliver P. John, and
Filip De Fruyt
Online First Publication, March 14, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pas0000591

CITATION
Abrahams, L., Pancorbo, G., Primi, R., Santos, D., Kyllonen, P., John, O. P., & De Fruyt, F. (2019,
March 14). Social-Emotional Skill Assessment in Children and Adolescents: Advances and
Challenges in Personality, Clinical, and Educational Contexts. Psychological Assessment. Advance
online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pas0000591
 Psychological Assessment
© 2019 American Psychological Association 2019, Vol. 1, No. 999, 000
1040-3590/19/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pas0000591

Social-Emotional Skill Assessment in Children and Adolescents: Advances

and Challenges in Personality, Clinical, and Educational Contexts

Loes Abrahams and Gina Pancorbo Ricardo Primi

Ghent University and Institute Ayrton Senna, São Paulo, Brazil University of San Francisco and Institute Ayrton Senna, São
Paulo, Brazil

Daniel Santos Patrick Kyllonen

University of São Paulo and Institute Ayrton Senna, São Paulo, Educational Testing Service, Princeton, New Jersey
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

Brazil
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

Oliver P. John Filip De Fruyt

University of California, Berkeley, and Institute Ayrton Senna, Ghent University and Institute Ayrton Senna, São Paulo, Brazil
São Paulo, Brazil

The development and promotion of social-emotional skills in childhood and adolescence contributes to
subsequent well-being and positive life outcomes. However, the assessment of these skills is associated
with conceptual and methodological challenges. This review discusses how social-emotional skill
measurement in youth could be improved in terms of skills’ conceptualization and classification, and in
terms of assessment techniques and methodologies. The first part of the review discusses various
conceptualizations of social-emotional skills, demonstrates their overlap with related constructs such as
emotional intelligence and the Big Five personality dimensions, and proposes an integrative set of
social-emotional skill domains that has been developed recently. Next, methodological approaches that
are innovative and may improve social-emotional assessments are presented, illustrated by concrete
examples. We discuss how these innovations could advance social-emotional assessments, and demon-
strate links to similar issues in related fields. We conclude the review by providing several concrete
assessment recommendations that follow from this discussion.

Public Significance Statement

This review discusses how the conceptualization and assessment of social-emotional skills could be
advanced to improve child and youth well-being. After presenting various social-emotional frame-
works and reviewing methodological approaches that may improve or innovate social-emotional
assessments, five concrete recommendations that may guide further research and practice are
provided.

Keywords: social-emotional skills, 21st century skills, educational assessment, subclinical assessment,
formative and summative assessment

Over the past decades, social-emotional skills have gained in- achievement, citizenship behavior, and employability, to physical
creasing attention given their relevance for predicting a broad and mental health and well-being (see Organisation for Economic
series of consequential outcomes, ranging from educational Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2015 for a review). The

nia, Berkeley, and eduLab21, Institute Ayrton Senna; Filip De Fruyt,

Loes Abrahams and Gina Pancorbo, Department of Developmental,
Personality and Social Psychology, Ghent University, and eduLab21, In-
stitute Ayrton Senna, São Paulo, Brazil; Ricardo Primi, Graduate Program
in Psychological Assessment, University of San Francisco, and eduLab21,
Institute Ayrton Senna, São Paulo, Brazil; Daniel Santos, Economics
Department, University of São Paulo, and eduLab21, Institute Ayrton
Senna; Patrick Kyllonen, Educational Testing Service, Princeton, New
Jersey; Oliver P. John, Department of Psychology, University of Califor-
Department of Developmental, Personality and Social Psychology, Ghent
University, and eduLab21, Institute Ayrton Senna.
Loes Abrahams and Gina Pancorbo equally contributed to this article
and share first authorship.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Loes Abra-
hams or Gina Pancorbo, Department of Developmental, Personality and Social
Psychology, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, B-9000 Gent, Belgium.
E-mail: loes.abrahams@ugent.be or gina.pancorbo@ugent.be

1
 2 ABRAHAMS ET AL.
promotion of these skills in educational contexts is driven by the
importance of enhancing adaptive functioning in children and
youth through the development of personal strengths that can serve
as tools to foster positive outcomes and prevent negative ones
(Kern, Benson, Steinberg, & Steinberg, 2016; Taylor, Oberle,
Durlak, & Weissberg, 2017). Initial work made extensive use of
clinically derived measures such as the Child Behavior Check List
(CBCL; Achenbach, 1991) or the Strengths and Difficulties Ques-
tionnaire (SDQ; Goodman, 1994) to assess social-emotional func-
tioning and evaluate the effects of social-emotional skill interven-
tions in education (Halle & Darling-Churchill, 2016). More
recently, the field has undergone a paradigm shift, away from the
initial emphasis on screening for vulnerabilities and a curative
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
approach, and toward more general preventive and promoting
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
actions instead. This shift has challenged the field of social-
emotional skill assessment that was chiefly directed to the descrip-
tion of deficits. Frequently used social-emotional skill assessment
tools such as the SDQ (Goodman, 1994), for example, include
more items to describe difficulties than to assess adaptive func-
tioning.
An additional paradigm shift occurred in the field of psycho-
diagnostics, namely a change in the conceptualization of problem
behavior where adaptive and maladaptive patterns of cognitive,
behavioral, or emotional functioning were increasingly considered
from a dimensional, rather than a categorical, perspective. Today,
differences between adaptive and maladaptive functioning are
considered to be more quantitative than qualitative and there is
growing evidence that this perspective is also useful to look at
many types of problem behavior in childhood and adolescence (De
Fruyt & De Clercq, 2014; De Fruyt, De Clercq, De Caluwé, &
Verbeke, 2017).
These two paradigm shifts brought the fields of normal and
abnormal assessment closer to each other, fostering more intense
collaboration between clinical, assessment, and educational psy-
chologists. As a response to these changed perspectives, multiple
social-emotional skill taxonomies and measurement tools have
been proposed by different groups of researchers to further inves-
tigate social-emotional skills and their development, introducing
various conceptual and methodological challenges. The first goal
of the present article is to review taxonomies of social-emotional
skills and propose an integrative and overarching conceptual
framework to describe them. The second and major goal is to
discuss measurement challenges and innovations to improve the
assessment of social-emotional skills. The review will close with
suggestions to advance synergies in the emerging field of social-
emotional assessment and facilitate collaboration between clini-
cally and educationally oriented assessment psychologists.1
Structuring the Social-Emotional Skills Domain
Defining the Social-Emotional Skill Space
Social-emotional skills have been broadly and pragmatically
defined as “the skills that are essential for navigating education
and the workplace in the current century” (Binkley et al., 2012,
p. v). A more conceptual and operational definition of social-
emotional skills was recently provided by De Fruyt et al. (2015)
suggesting that social-emotional skills are individual characteris-
tics that originate from biological predispositions and environmen-
tal factors, manifested as consistent patterns of thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors, developed through formal and informal learning
experiences, and that influence different outcomes throughout the
individual’s life.
Many alternative terms have been proposed in addition to
“social-emotional skills,” such as “noncognitive skills,” “21st cen-
tury skills,” “character skills,” “transferable skills,” or “soft skills”
(see also Duckworth & Yeager, 2015 for a review; Kyllonen,
2012). Not surprisingly, this variety of terminologies has been
described as a problem in the field (Kyllonen, Lipnevich, Burrus,
& Roberts, 2014), although as stated by Duckworth and Yeager
(2015), all terms refer to the same “conceptual space” (p. 239) and
share similar attributes with respect to their independence from
cognitive abilities, derived benefits for students, and dependency
on situational factors.
In addition to the numerous overarching terms to label skills,
several authors have independently concluded that there is huge
variability in the number and nature of the skills included in
different models and frameworks (Kyllonen et al., 2014; National
Research Council (NRC), 2011, 2012; Primi, Santos, John, & De
Fruyt, 2016; Voogt & Roblin, 2012) and that “there is no consen-
sus on the number and nature of the constructs needed to represent
social-emotional characteristics” (Primi, Santos, et al., 2016, p. 6).
The OECD (2015), for example, outlined four groups of skills:
cognitive, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and technical, while the
National Research Council (NRC, 2011) proposed only the three
domains of cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal skills. From
the positive psychology approach, the Positive Youth Develop-
ment (PYD; Bowers et al., 2010) perspective proposes the “5Cs”
model defined by competence, confidence, character, caring, and
connection, whereas Seligman’s PERMA model (Seligman, 2011)
outlines five pillars: positive emotion, engagement, relationships,
meaning, and accomplishment. Popular measures describing psy-
chological adjustment in children and youth that are used as
indicators of social-emotional skills like the SDQ (Goodman,
1994) include four subscales that focus on four types of difficulties
(conduct problems, hyperactivity, emotional symptoms, and peer
problems) and one subscale on strengths (prosocial behavior).
Overlap and Related Constructs
Social-emotional skill frameworks not only differ in terms of
labels and scope, but many of their skills also show overlap and
share similarities in their underlying constructs (Geisinger, 2016;
John & Mauskopf, 2015; Kyllonen, 2016; Primi, Santos, et al.,
2016; Voogt & Roblin, 2012). The National Research Council
(NRC, 2012), for example, documented communalities between
social-emotional skills, abilities (see e.g., Occupational Network
or OⴱNET) and personality dimensions, and provided evidence for
the occurrence of the “jangle fallacy,” referring to the use of
different terminology to describe the same construct.
The lack of shared definitions and overlap among skills en-
closed in different frameworks have implications for their mea-
surement. As stated by the NRC (2011), a clear definition of the
constructs behind the skills is a necessary condition for assess-
ment. Ziegler and Brunner (2016) emphasized this idea by claim-
1
Our study did not go through any ethics committee review because no
additional data was collected.
 SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL SKILL ASSESSMENT
ing that a precise definition of the construct is crucial for formu-
lating items that can accurately measure the construct. If not, two
measures that intend to capture the same construct may have items
with divergent content, which leads to different testing results for
the same target. For that reason, the authors highlighted the im-
portance of defining the behavioral manifestations of the construct,
as well as specifying the way the construct relates to others
(Ziegler, Booth, & Bensch, 2013), hence building the nomological
net of a construct (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955).
In response to this conceptual problem, some authors have put
efforts on examining the convergences and divergences between
social-emotional skills measures, and started clustering their dif-
ferent terms into a smaller number of overarching constructs (e.g.,
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
NRC, 2012; Primi, Santos, et al., 2016). For example, convincing
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
evidence suggests that the skills included in social-emotional skill
frameworks can be organized in the broad domains of the Big Five
personality traits of Conscientiousness, Negative Emotionality,
Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Openness to Experience (see
John, Naumann, & Soto, 2008 for a review of the Big Five). In line
with this perspective, Kyllonen et al. (2014) and Primi, Santos, et
al. (2016) independently proposed frameworks of social-emotional
skills that have a strong parallel with the Big Five after theoretical
and empirical analyses. Primi, Santos, and colleagues (2016) em-
pirically examined the commonality across more than 200 items
selected from eight instruments that are widely used to measure
social-emotional skills, and found that the main social-emotional skill
dimensions show substantial overlap with the dimensions specified by
the Big Five. Other researchers, using a more top-down approach,
explicitly developed social-emotional skill sets aligned with the Big
Five (e.g., Guerra, Modecki, & Cunningham’s PRACTICE model;
Guerra, Modecki, & Cunningham, 2014; Lipnevich, Preckel, & Rob-
erts, 2016). Guerra and colleagues (2014) emphasize that while the
Big Five predicts a variety of (work-related) outcomes, a more fine-
grained skill-based approach seems crucial to improve performance
and well-being. Social-emotional learning programs may, for exam-
ple, benefit from “the identification of modifiable skills that are
aligned with more enduring traits” (Guerra et al., 2014, p. 5). In
addition, specific social-emotional skill interventions may be better
targeted to develop narrow skills, or subskills, instead of trying to
affect the broader skill domain defined at the level of the Big Five.
Other social-emotional skill frameworks have been developed
from more specific literatures in the domain of individual differ-
ences. The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional
Learning (CASEL) defines social-emotional learning as:
. . . the processes through which children and adults acquire and
effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to
understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel
and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive rela-
tionships, and make responsible decisions.
(CASEL, 2013, p. 4) and is strongly rooted in the emotional
intelligence literature. Van der Zee, Thijs, and Schakel (2002)
examined the underlying structure of emotional intelligence do-
mains, and found three main dimensions: Empathy, Autonomy,
and Emotional Control. Clearly, these dimensions could also be
placed under the umbrella of social-emotional skills, and are
included in numerous social-emotional taxonomies (see e.g., CA-
SEL, 2013; Guerra et al., 2014; Zins, Weissberg, Wang, & Wal-
berg, 2004).
3
Finally, other researchers have used a combination of clinical
inventories to examine children’s social-emotional functioning
(e.g., Briggs-Gowan & Carter, 2008; Carter, Garrity-Rokous,
Chazan-Cohen, Little, & Briggs-Gowan, 2001; Leerkes, Blankson,
& O’Brien, 2009; Semple, Lee, Rosa, & Miller, 2010; Squires,
Bricker, Heo, & Twombly, 2001). For example, the SDQ (Good-
man, 1994) has been used for social-emotional screening in clin-
ical and nonclinical samples (see Woerner et al., 2004 for a
review). In some cases, the SDQ has been linked to measures of
emotional intelligence (Poulou, 2014) and the Big Five (Muris,
Meesters, & Diederen, 2005; Slobodskaya, 2007), showing a clear
overlap between several subscales of these measures. It is note-
worthy to mention that in many studies with nonclinical popula-
tions the difficulty subscales of the SDQ have been used separately
to assess, for example, the effects of school connectedness on
school climate (Loukas, Suzuki, & Horton, 2006), the predictors of
engagement and achievement in education (Sanders, Munford, &
Thimasarn-Anwar, 2016), and the effects of a physical activity
intervention in schools (Bunketorp Käll, Malmgren, Olsson, Lin-
dén, & Nilsson, 2015). Clearly, the scales of the SDQ are relevant
for assessing the psychological adjustment of children and youth
(e.g., externalizing and internalizing behavior problems); nonethe-
less, it might be more useful to approach the assessment of
children and youth’s adaptations and positive functioning in envi-
ronmental settings like the school context by focusing on strengths
rather than on difficulties, and by using specifically designed
measures that assess a broader range of social-emotional con-
structs.
Toward a Common Structure
There have been many initiatives to identify the commonalities
across different frameworks to integrate skills into more compre-
hensive and distinct categories. As suggested by Kyllonen and
colleagues (2014), the advantages of coming up with a common
social-emotional skills framework “means that the maximum num-
ber of researchers can contribute to advances in our knowledge of
how to assess, how to intervene, and how to develop students,
using standard terminology” (p. 1), and that the evidence collected
could be well-accepted by scientific, educational, and other com-
munities of practice.
John and De Fruyt (2015) recently reviewed the various social-
emotional skill frameworks that were advocated during the past
two decades, grouping them under the broad umbrella of the Big
Five, in line with the empirical evidence provided by Kyllonen et
al. (2014) and Primi, Santos, et al. (2016). Building on this
evidence, as well on recent reviews and analyses of more-specific
aspects or facets (DeYoung, Quilty, & Peterson, 2007; Soto &
John, 2017), Primi, John, Santos, and De Fruyt (2017) proposed an
integrative set of five domains of social-emotional skill character-
istics, along with a set of more specific skills that cover the broad
domain of social-emotional functioning in youth. The ambition of
the model was not completeness of coverage, as completeness
would have resulted in an overly large, unmanageable and, thus,
impractical set of constructs. Rather, the goal was more pragmatic:
to capture a comprehensive yet manageable set of skill constructs
that have predictive value for a diverse set of consequential out-
comes, and that could serve either as stand-alone skills or as
building blocks to form more complex, “hybrid” skills (see below
 4 ABRAHAMS ET AL.

for further detail). Such a pragmatic focus is the only realistic
option given the time-constraints in large-scale assessments, espe-
cially in school settings, where the proposed skill set needs to be
rich enough to include those social-emotional skills that connect to
a broad range of desirable goals that policy and decision makers
want to promote, or to negative outcomes they want to prevent, in
educational settings. This integrative skill model can, of course, be
extended by adding specific skills, depending on the particular
objectives that researchers or practitioners may have.
Primi et al.’s model (Primi et al., 2017) distinguishes among five
broad social-emotional skill domains: Self-management (related to
Conscientiousness from the personality literature), the interper-
sonal dimensions Engaging with Others (conceptually related to
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
consensus on grouping and labeling skills will facilitate the inclu-
sion of social-emotional skills as end-points in the educational
curricula, help to determine the target group and the ways to
achieve social-emotional learning, identify the contexts and situ-
ations where the behaviors associated with the skills are to be
manifested, and select the most appropriate method for assessing
them (NRC, 2011). The Government of Ireland (Irish National
Teachers’ Organisation, 2012), for example, fosters self-confidence,
self-worth, and self-awareness attitudes in students in primary educa-
tion to increase students’ sense of self-efficacy, to gain control over
their own life, and to understand their environment. They chose to
implement these skills through active learning inside and outside the
classroom, and to use formative methods such as self- and peer

Extraversion) and Amity (related to Agreeableness), Negative- assessment to achieve these learning goals.
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

Emotion Regulation (associated with Negative Affectivity or Neu-

roticism) and Open-mindedness (associated with Openness to ex-
perience). The more specific skills grouped under these broad
headers are described in Table 1. These social-emotional domains
and facets should serve as an integrative framework that can be
used to build evidence, cross-sectionally and longitudinally, about
the consequential outcomes of social-emotional skills throughout
the development of children and youth.
Benefits of a Comprehensive Social-Emotional
Skill Framework
The effort of agreeing on common conceptual and operational
definitions of social-emotional skills is beneficial for multiple
reasons in different areas of expertise. In the educational area, a
On the other hand, a well-defined framework of social-emotional
skills and validated instruments to measure them could also serve to
promote adaptive functioning and prevent deficits in children and
adolescents. The relatively large proportion of (young) children with
social-emotional and behavioral problems emphasizes the crucial
need for adequate social-emotional skill development and training in
education (Carter, Briggs-Gowan, & Davis, 2004). Prevalence esti-
mates vary, but the majority of studies report that between 10 and
15% of 2- and 3-year olds suffer from social-emotional problems.
Many of these problems, however, initially remain under the radar
and are not addressed in a timely way by social service systems. As
social-emotional problems are likely to persist over time and form risk
factors for the emergence of behavior problems and psychopathology
(Carter et al., 2004; De Bolle, Beyers, De Clercq, & De Fruyt, 2012),

Table 1
Social-Emotional Skill Domains and Facets (Primi et al., 2017)

Domain Facet Definition

Self-management Determination Setting goals and high standards, motivating oneself, working very hard, and applying
oneself fully to the task, work, or project at hand.
Organization Possessing organizational skills and meticulous attention to detail that are useful for
planning and executing plans to reach longer-term goals.
Focus Focusing attention and concentrating on the current task, and avoiding distractions.
Persistence Overcoming obstacles to reach important goals.
Responsibility Possessing time management skills, being punctual, and honoring commitments.
Engaging with others Social initiative Approaching and connecting with others, both friends and strangers, initiating,
maintaining, and enjoying social contact and connections.
Assertiveness Speaking up, voicing opinions, needs, and feelings, and exerting social influence.
Enthusiasm Showing passion and zest for life; approaching daily tasks with energy, excitement,
and a positive attitude.
Amity Compassion Using empathy and perspective taking skills to understand the needs and feelings of
others, acting on that understanding with kindness and consideration of others.
Respect Treating others with respect and politeness.
Trust Assuming that others generally have good intentions and forgiving those that have
done wrong.
Negative-emotion regulation Stress modulation Modulating anxiety and response to stress.
Self-confidence Feeling satisfied with self and current life, having positive thoughts about self, and
maintaining optimistic expectations.
Frustration tolerance Regulating temper, anger, and irritation; maintaining tranquility and equanimity in the
face of frustrations.
Open-mindedness Intellectual curiosity Mustering interest in ideas and a passion for learning, understanding, and intellectual
exploration.
Creative Generating novel ways to think about or do things through experimenting, tinkering,
imagination learning from failure, insight, and vision.
Artistic interest Valuing, appreciating, and enjoying design, art, and beauty, which may be
experienced or expressed in writing, visual and performing arts, music, and other
forms of self-actualization.
 SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL SKILL ASSESSMENT 5

early follow-up and monitoring of social-emotional development in disagree (nay-saying) with questionnaire items, regardless of their
education is vital. content, and its effects have long been recognized in adults (e.g.,
Cronbach, 1946; Jackson & Messick, 1958). When left uncon-
Assessment Challenges and Innovations trolled, individual differences in acquiescence tend to positively
bias interitem correlations, increasing the (positive) correlations
The growing attention to social-emotional skill development as
between two items keyed in the same direction but decreasing the
an explicit outcome in education is a new focus and in addition to
(negative) correlations between items keyed in the opposite direc-
mastery of math, languages, arts, and sciences. This new focus
tion (one true and one false keyed).
necessitates dedicated and high-quality monitoring tools to assess
Whereas the existence of acquiescence effects has long been
the social-emotional skill development and progress of children
recognized in adults, Soto, John, Gosling, and Potter (2008) stud-
and adolescents. The development and improvement of social-
ied acquiescence effects in children, expecting acquiescence to be
emotional assessment tools and methods is, therefore, a priority.
one of the culprits responsible for the much less clear factor
As we set out below, social-emotional skill assessment is consid-
structures typically found in younger respondents. Indeed, individ-
ered challenging because of multiple measurement issues such as
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

ual differences in acquiescence were much more pronounced in

response styles (e.g., acquiescence), bandwidth—fidelity prob-
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

children, decreasing linearly and substantially (by about half) from

lems, and lack of convergence between measures (Ziegler &
age 10 to the typical adult level at age 19. Even more important,
Brunner, 2016) that are also prominent in the broader field of
acquiescence variance seriously distorted the factor structures of
individual differences assessment.
personality self-ratings in the youngest children; at age 10, for
Brackett et al. (2006), for example, found no relationship be-
example, the standard Big Five structure could not be recovered in
tween a self-report measure of emotional intelligence (EI) and
the raw data but did emerge when individual differences in acqui-
observable behaviors in a social encounter, and even the Mayer-
escence were controlled. These findings for children have been
Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT; Mayer,
extended to adults with lower educational attainment; for example,
Salovey, & Caruso, 2002), a performance measure of EI, was only
Rammstedt and Farmer (2013), found that the expected Big Five
able to predict social competence for men, but not for women
structure could be obtained for low educational-attainment groups
(Brackett et al., 2006). In addition, few studies have obtained
only after correcting for individual differences in acquiescence.
convergent validity evidence for the scale scores of the SDQ with
These findings have led to a renewed interest in understanding the
similar instruments in nonclinical populations of children and
causes and consequences of acquiescence, and researchers have
adolescents (e.g., Koskelainen, Sourander, & Kaljonen, 2000;
suggested different approaches to correcting individuals’ re-
Muris, Meesters, Eijkelenboom, & Vincken, 2004), and others
sponses to rating scales, such as within-person centering around an
have found low internal consistency in the test scores of some
acquiescence index (Rammstedt, Danner, & Bosnjak, 2017; Soto
subscales mainly because of problems with the reversed coded
et al., 2008), using anchoring vignettes (Mõttus et al., 2012), and
items (i.e., adaptive or positive items; Muris et al., 2004; Ortuño-
applying statistical corrections (Buckley, 2009).
Sierra et al., 2015; Ruchkin, Jones, Vermeiren, & Schwab-Stone,
Anchoring vignettes. Respondents from different cultural
2008).
backgrounds also seem to differ in the way they use Likert rating
These and other problems have led researchers to explore var-
scales. Using simple Likert scales, studies using the PISA 2003
ious ways either to optimize current assessment methods or to
data found a counterintuitive pattern of findings in which correla-
introduce alternative assessment methods to describe social-
tions between noncognitive factors (such as motivation) and actual
emotional skills. Duckworth and Yeager (2015) described a series
cognitive achievement measures were positive at the within-
of potential problems associated with the use of self-descriptions
country level (as expected), but unexpectedly negative at the
using Likert rating scales, but also discussed alternative types of
between-country level (Bertling, Borgonovi, & Almonte, 2016;
measures that may alleviate the shortcomings of rating scales, or
Kyllonen & Bertling, 2013). Assessing the same constructs with
suggested to complement rating scales with other methods. In the
different response formats in which response style effects were
following section, we will discuss assessment challenges and re-
avoided removed this anomaly, suggesting that Likert scales may
cent innovations in social-emotional skill research.
not be ideal for cross-country comparisons because of their sus-
ceptibility to response style effects. Kyllonen and Bertling (2013)
Optimizing Current Assessment Methods
and He and Van de Vijver (2016) suggested that the cross-country
Large-scale international assessments, such as the Programme comparability of students’ self-descriptions on Likert scales could
for International Student Assessment (PISA), have started to pay be improved by rescaling students’ ratings based on their re-
attention to students’ social-emotional skills (OECD, 2013), illus- sponses to so-called anchoring vignettes.
trating that education officials are shifting from their primary (or Anchoring vignettes serve the goal of taking individuals’ dif-
even exclusive) focus on academic abilities to a growing concern ferential interpretation and use of rating scales into account, and
about students’ social-emotional skills. The between-country com- may help correct various response styles such as acquiescence,
parisons of students in PISA pose additional challenges for assess- extreme responding, or differential use of the scale (Primi, Zanon,
ments, given likely cultural differences in the way students ap- Santos, De Fruyt, & John, 2016). Using the anchoring vignette
proach and respond to Likert-type rating scales. Different ways to technique, individuals rate the behavior or traits of a person in a
correct raw scores on rating scales have been suggested to deal hypothetical scenario using the same response format and on the
with these problems. same rating scale as they later rate their own behavior or traits (for
Correction for acquiescence. Acquiescent responding is an an example see Primi, Zanon, et al., 2016). Because all individuals
individual’s general tendency to consistently agree (yea-saying) or rate the same vignette, variability among individuals in their re-
 6 ABRAHAMS ET AL.
sponses can be attributed to interindividual variability in scale use
(Vonkova, Bendl, & Papajoanu, 2017). Individuals’ self-ratings
can then be rescaled based on their ratings on the anchoring
vignettes; in the PISA 2012 assessments, this rescaling led to the
elimination of the motivation-achievement paradox discussed earlier
(He & Van de Vijver, 2016; Kyllonen & Bertling, 2013). A recent
study (Vonkova et al., 2017) found that 7th-grade students used
vignette rating scales different across different contexts, and recom-
mended using vignettes closely related to the construct of interest.
However, other research suggests that vignettes tapping into unrelated
behavior serve equally well for rescaling all of individuals’ responses,
suggesting that response tendencies are general rather than construct
specific (Kyllonen & Bertling, 2013). If this finding is generalizable,
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social-emotional skills assessments addressing a variety of skills are
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therefore not bound to develop multiple skill-specific vignettes, which
is an advantage when assessment time is limited
Multiple methods and informants. Adopting multiple as-
sessment methods—although time-consuming—may also help al-
leviate the problems associated with using Likert scales and bring
additional information to the table for the assessment of social-
emotional skills (Campbell & Fiske, 1959; Duckworth & Yeager,
2015). Using multiple methods may minimize the weaknesses of
each of the individual methods (Scollon, Kim-Prieto, & Diener,
2003) and increases reliability and (construct) validity of the test
scores (Campbell & Fiske, 1959; Eid & Diener, 2006). In addition,
adopting multiple methods allows for an estimation of the variance
that is systematically associated with each method (John & Soto,
2007). Thus, although using multiple methods requires additional
resources, it enriches the data substantially, and it may provide
answers to a larger variety of research questions (McDonald,
2008). The multidimensional nature of social-emotional skills
would be discredited by assessing it through only one method or
by relying on a single informant.
However, when including multiple informants to assess social-
emotional skills, researchers should also take into account the type
of informant, as there may be substantial variability among infor-
mants’ perceptions. A review by Major, Seabra-Santos, and Martin
(2015), for example, found larger agreement between teacher and
parent ratings when assessing externalizing than internalizing
problem behaviors, and overall the correlations indicating agree-
ment in their ratings of children’s social-emotional skills were
modest. The authors suggested that this could be because of the
different settings where teachers and parents perceived children’s
behaviors. This is not surprising given that social-emotional skills
are multidimensional constructs that are manifested somewhat
differently in different contexts (Ramsey, Spira, Parisi, & Rebok,
2016). Therefore, the various actors (e.g., teachers, parents, and
students) involved may each value and focus on particular aspects
of the construct and, thus, informants’ unique frames of reference
should not be discarded.
Compound scales. Educational curricula define learning goals
usually referring to broad descriptions that are often highly value-
laden, or refer to multidimensional constructs tapping into multiple
skills or traits, such as “global citizenship,” “entrepreneurship,” or
“leadership.” The key challenge for the evaluation of such hybrid
and multidimensional skill terms is to first decompose them into
their constituent skills defined in an existing skill taxonomy, and
subsequently think about ways to psychometrically recombine the
constituting skill scores to serve as an indicator of the hybrid skill
listed as a curriculum objective. Vergauwe, Wille, Hofmans, and
De Fruyt (2017), for example, recently suggested a compound
scale to assess individuals’ standing on the hybrid construct of
“charismatic leadership,” relying on an individual’s score on a set
of distinct personality traits. Vergauwe and colleagues asked ex-
perts to rate a prototypical charismatic individual on all 30 facets
of the NEO-PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 1995), subsequently retaining
those facets that were rated as prototypically high or prototypically
low, and computing an aggregate score relying on positively keyed
and reversed scored negatively keyed facets. Similarly, complex
and more clinical constructs, such as personality disorders, have
been approached in this way in clinical assessment (Bastiaansen,
Rossi, & De Fruyt, 2013; Miller, Bagby, Pilkonis, Reynolds, &
Lynam, 2005; Widiger, Costa, & McCrae, 2002). The same ap-
proach could be used relying on Primi et al.’s (2017) previously
described social-emotional skill set to describe hybrid skill con-
structs in education, such as “entrepreneurial skill” or “appreciat-
ing diversity.”
Innovative Approaches to the Assessment of Social-
Emotional Skills
In addition to correcting, optimizing, and/or regrouping estab-
lished skill scales, several innovative assessment approaches have
been introduced in the field of social-emotional skills assessment
during the recent past as alternatives to Likert-based measurement.
Forced-choice response format. A major weakness of the
unidimensional Likert scales providing test-takers with one item at
a time is their susceptibility to faking (i.e., intentionally responding
in an untruthful way) because it is often obvious to participants
that either a high or a low level on a certain item is more favorable.
In forced-choice assessments, individuals are asked to consider
multiple statements at a time and to rate the extent to which items
apply to them relative to the other items (Brown & Maydeu-
Olivares, 2014). That is, students are asked to rank-order a pre-
defined set of items or are instructed to indicate which item applies
most and which applies least to them. As several items may tap
into equally favorable traits and participants cannot simultaneously
endorse all items to the same extent, test-takers cannot use faking
to score equally high on all scales.
There is meta-analytic evidence suggesting that forced-choice
measures are less susceptible to faking and this increases their
predictive validity for academic and job related outcomes when
compared with single statement Likert-scale measures (Salgado &
Táuriz, 2014). In addition, response style effects such as acquies-
cence and extreme responding may be avoided altogether in
forced-choice measures because they do not use an explicit rating
scale on which such biases could develop (Kyllonen, 2014, 2016);
this is of particular interest because, as noted earlier, these re-
sponse styles are more pronounced at younger ages (Soto et al.,
2008; see also Bachman, O’Malley, & Freedman-Doan, 2010;
Batchelor, Miao, & McDaniel, 2013). Although these advantages
make forced-choice measures highly promising for the assessment
of social-emotional skills, analyzing forced-choice data poses sev-
eral psychometric challenges because of the ipsative nature of the
responses. Although these issues can be overcome using item
response theory modeling (Brown & Maydeu-Olivares, 2011), this
is clearly a less straightforward approach than the scoring of
simple Likert scales. An additional main drawback of the use of
 SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL SKILL ASSESSMENT
forced-choice formats for the assessment of children’s social-
emotional skills is that the forced-choice format might be too
complex for young children (Meisenberg & Williams, 2008; Pet-
way, Brenneman, & Kyllonen, 2016). Therefore, future assess-
ments of social-emotional skills could aim to develop forced-
choice methods that are tailored to students’ age and cognitive
development, such as games or interactive tasks involving puppets
for assessments with very young children. One example is research
using the Berkeley Puppet Interview to obtain self-reports of the
Big Five domains from children as young as age 5 (Measelle, John,
Ablow, Cowan, & Cowan, 2005), which could be adapted to a
forced-choice format.
Rubrics as Likert-scale anchors. Most often, Likert-scales
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are presented with numbers or generic labels as scale anchors (e.g.,
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“fully disagree,” “disagree,” “agree,” or “fully agree”). An alter-
native is to use behaviorally anchored-scales, using skill levels
defined in rubrics as anchors. Rubrics are a set of quality criteria
for scoring a certain type of performance (Allen & Tanner, 2006)
and have been frequently used in formative assessment to provide
feedback to students and in summative assessment to grade stu-
dents’ work both with self- and peer ratings (Panadero & Jonsson,
2013; Reddy & Andrade, 2010). Rubrics have the potential to
promote learning and to support instruction because the defined
skill levels create clear expectations of performance, making scor-
ing and feedback more transparent (Jonsson & Svingby, 2007).
The explicitly and clearly formulated assessment criteria expressed
in rubrics provide advantages over other assessment methods both
in terms of children’s capability of self-assessment and in terms of
their capacity to regulate their performance (Panadero & Jonsson,
2013). In this respect, rubrics might be more effective than simple
Likert-scale based evaluations of competencies (Bartlett et al.,
2015). The Partnership for 21st Century Learning and the Assess-
ment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project, for example,
have developed rubrics to measure the progression of social-
emotional skills in students as part of formative assessment initia-
tives. It has been suggested, however, that merely providing rubric
descriptions to students is not sufficient for performance improve-
ment; constructive feedback is a necessary prerequisite for rubrics
to be an effective tool for learning (Panadero & Jonsson, 2013;
Wollenschläger, Hattie, Machts, Möller, & Harms, 2016).
A review by Jonsson and Svingby (2007) concluded that the use
of rubrics can enhance the internal consistency of test scores,
especially when rubrics are topic-specific or assess a specific
dimension of performance, and their scoring system is well-
defined. They concluded, however, that there is insufficient evi-
dence to affirm that the use of rubrics can lead to valid inferences
about performance because of the small number of convergent,
divergent, and construct validity studies on the use of rubrics.
There is hence a large need to examine the validity and the effects
of using rubrics to assess cognitive and social-emotional skills’
outcomes before these can be recommended to replace more
concrete and tangible academic outputs such as writing essays, oral
presentations, or solving math problems.
The construction of social-emotional skill rubrics will have to be
based on developmental theories of specific skills describing in-
creasing mastery levels of that skill (e.g., different levels of em-
pathy [Gladstein, 1983] or emotion regulation [Gross & Thomp-
son, 2007]). The key features of these levels subsequently have to
be operationally translated into short narrative descriptions that
7
children and adolescents can understand and distinguish from each
other. For formative assessment objectives, these narratives will
also serve didactic purposes, providing feedback to the individual
student (and eventually to the teacher/coach/counseling psycholo-
gist) at what level s/he currently is, and what the next steps to
attain are. To be in a better position to support youth in these
developmental processes, we need meta-analytic research, exam-
ining effects of social-emotional skill interventions to increase
mastery levels of specific skills. Such meta-analytic findings are
preferably structured in terms of the social-emotional skill taxon-
omy advocated in this article. Assessment tools with rubrics will
have to be constructed in such a way to be able to pick up “change”
in students’ standing on social-emotional skills.
Within-individual differences and dynamic performance.
Ambulatory assessment is another type of assessment that provides
numerous advantages over traditional one-time self- and other-
reports. Although various types and names have been coined (e.g.,
daily diary methods, Bolger, Davis, & Rafaeli, 2003; ecological
momentary assessment, Stone & Shiffman, 1994; everyday expe-
rience methods, Reis & Gable, 2000; experience sampling, Larson
& Csikszentmihalyi, 1983), the general idea of ambulatory assess-
ment is that several times a day individuals report on their current
feelings, thoughts, or behaviors as they are experienced in their
everyday environment (Beal, 2015; Hofmans, De Clercq, Kup-
pens, Verbeke, & Widiger, 2018; Zirkel, Garcia, & Murphy,
2015). Most assessment methods that are currently used in social-
emotional skill measurement are designed to measure differences
between students. Ambulatory assessments on the contrary, are
primarily suited for the assessment of intraindividual variability, in
other words how the student’s standing on social-emotional skills
fluctuates across situations. The multiple data points within the
individual provide a rich variety of information on how experi-
ences may vary over short time frames and contexts (Scollon et al.,
2003; Zirkel et al., 2015), providing insight into the dynamics of
functioning of the student. In addition, several recent studies have
started to integrate situational measures in ambulatory assessments
to examine how state variability is shaped by situational variability
(e.g., Jones, Brown, Serfass, & Sherman, 2017; Sherman, Rauth-
mann, Brown, Serfass, & Jones, 2015). This might provide unique
opportunities for studying dynamic aspects of social-emotional
skill development and functioning by enabling examinations of
possible situational sources of variability in students’ functioning.
One of the major advantages of ambulatory assessment is that
because participants report on their state or behavior at the time it
is experienced, their responses are not affected by retrospective
biases—such as recall inaccuracies and memory limitations—that
might be present in common questionnaire assessments (Becker,
Goetz, Morger, & Ranellucci, 2014; Trull & Ebner-Priemer,
2013). Although ambulatory assessments are designed to be brief,
a drawback of these multiple assessments is that participation
requires considerable effort. This need to persist in the task of
dutifully responding to recurring assessments could be especially
challenging for children. That is, although participating in an
ambulatory assessment study may be exciting for them at the
beginning, initial enthusiasm might fade away, potentially intro-
ducing response biases. Another drawback may be that the recur-
ring questions in ambulatory assessment might make participants
more perceptive of their own behavior, inducing extra self-
awareness expressed in reported behavioral change (Zirkel et al.,
 8 ABRAHAMS ET AL.
2015), although such negative effects are not necessarily reported
(Larson, 1989).
Biodata. While ambulatory assessment targets individuals’
experiences in the present, biodata studies use standardized ques-
tions to ask individuals about biographical details, such as the
frequency of the occurrence of certain events, behaviors, or expe-
riences in the past (Kyllonen et al., 2014; Lipnevich, MacCann, &
Roberts, 2013; Oswald, Schmitt, Kim, Ramsay, & Gillespie,
2004). Biodata information has mainly been used for college
admissions and has shown incremental validity for the prediction
of college students’ performance beyond SAT and Big Five per-
sonality (Oswald et al., 2004). Other research has demonstrated
biodata studies’ potential of assessing specific personality traits.
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Jackson and colleagues (2010), for example, developed a set of
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behavioral indicators of Conscientiousness and found that the
lower-order structure of these behavioral indicators was almost
identical to the lower-order structure from extensive self-report
measures of Conscientiousness. In addition, individuals’ responses
on the behavioral indicators of Conscientiousness were strongly
related to their actual conscientious behaviors as reflected in an
experience sampling study. Given that biodata measures are less
prone to faking than traditional self-report inventories and less
time-consuming than ambulatory assessment, they might be a
practical method for the assessment of specific skill-related behav-
iors.
Situational Judgment Tests. Another assessment method find-
ing a quick entry into the assessment of social-emotional skills are
Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs). In SJTs, respondents are pro-
vided with a set of hypothetical scenarios accompanied by several
plausible courses of action. Depending on the exact design of the
SJT, test-takers are asked to rank or rate the varying responses
according to their appropriateness in that situation. Alternatively,
participants can be offered multiple response options and could be
requested to select the most appropriate response to the situation
(Motowidlo, Dunnette, & Carter, 1990). The use of SJTs has
shown a tremendous increase over the past 25 years (Campion,
Ployhart, & MacKenzie, 2014), and they “have emerged recently
in education as opportunities to enliven research, practice, and
policy” (Anderson, Thier, & Pitts, 2017, p. 48). For example,
Klassen and his colleagues (2016) recently developed the first
SJT-based selection test for candidates of primary teacher educa-
tion programs. Their empirical search led to scenarios in three
broad domains that showed a large degree of overlap with the three
main domains of the theoretically based Classroom Assessment
Scoring System (CLASS; Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008),
namely emotional support, classroom organization, and instruc-
tional support. While researchers do not unanimously agree on
whether the development of SJT scenarios should be inductively
driven— based on critical incidents as provided by subject matter
experts—, or deductively driven— based on theoretical frame-
works—(Campion et al., 2014), the study by Klassen and his
colleagues suggests that an integration of both should be the
ultimate goal.
SJTs seem to be favored over self-reports in terms of the validity
of test scores’ interpretation and susceptibility to bias (Anderson et
al., 2017), and numerous studies have shown the validity of SJTs’
test scores as predictors of job and academic performance (Sackett
& Lievens, 2008). In addition, like ESMs, they provide a feasible
avenue to capture within-individual variability, analyzing the in-
dividual’s reactions to different types of situations. Recently,
Lievens and his colleagues (in press) demonstrated that university
students’ intraindividual variability on certain traits predicted peer-
rated academic task performance. An additional key finding was
that within-individual variability as reflected in the responses to
the hypothetical scenarios was related to actual everyday life
variability as reported in a subsequent experience sampling study.
SJTs might, therefore, provide a more practicable alternative to the
relatively time-consuming experience sampling studies for the
assessment of inter- and intraindividual variability observable in
social-emotional skills.
Performance measures. Although the aforementioned as-
sessment methods illustrate the positive progression toward the use
of tools that are less susceptible to biases and faking, one could
argue that for high-stakes purposes, such as some forms of sum-
mative assessment in education, the validity of test scores is still
questionable (Kyllonen, 2016). Instead, the “holy grail” (Kyllonen,
2016, p. 205) for such assessments would be objective perfor-
mance measures that are able to measure social-emotional skills.
Numerous skill-specific performance measures have been de-
veloped over the past decades, mainly to assess critical thinking
and creativity (e.g., California Critical Thinking Skills Test, Fa-
cione, 1991; Torrance Tests of Creativity, Torrance, 1966; among
others), which could imply that these two skills seem to lend
themselves better for performance tests than others (e.g., emotional
control, self-confidence). However, the challenging goal is to
integrate multiple skills into one test. For example, the College and
Work Readiness Assessment (CWRA) involves not only critical
thinking but also analytical reasoning, problem solving, and writ-
ten communication skills (Partnership for 21st Century Skills,
2009).
Modern days’ technological advances have contributed to the
development of more sophisticated computer-based performance
assessments. One example is the Objective Achievement Motiva-
tion Test in which—as the name implies—individuals’ achieve-
ment motivation is examined by playing of a sort of computer
game (for more information see Schmidt-Atzert, 2004). In addition
to being less susceptible to faking (Arendasy, Sommer, Herle,
Schützhofer, & Inwanschitz, 2011; Elliot, Lawty-Jones, & Jack-
son, 1996; Ziegler, Schmidt-Atzert, Bühner, & Krumm, 2007),
computer tasks can have an additional advantage in social-emotional
skill assessment with children because of their user-friendliness and
playful nature. Despite these advantages, the often-found lack of
convergence between objective and self-report measures (Ortner &
Proyer, 2015) suggests that there is room for improvement and that
these methods have not yet been exploited maximally to live up to
their full potential.
In addition, as Falk and Heckman (2009) argued, while many
social scientists are reluctant to employ laboratory studies because
they “lack realism and generalizability” (p. 535), experiments can
be designed to contain naturalistic validity and to provide con-
trolled variation. Assessing students’ social-emotional behavior in
well-controlled tasks can then provide insight in what students
actually do, instead of what they or others say they do. For
example, an intervention targeted at increasing students’ levels of
grit (i.e., perseverance to reach long-term goals) led to a higher
likelihood of choosing a challenging but rewarding experimental
task as compared with an easy but less rewarding alternative (Alan,
Boneva, & Ertac, 2016).
 SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL SKILL ASSESSMENT
Conclusions on Assessment Challenges
and Innovations
The above-mentioned methods show different ways to correct
the response tendencies associated with Likert scales, traditionally
used for assessing social-emotional skills. Lessons learnt from the
correction of individual differences in acquiescent responding in
personality reports (e.g., Soto et al., 2008) and the promising
evidence on the use of anchoring vignettes to rescale and correct
self-report measures of social-emotional skills (Primi, Zanon, et
al., 2016), constitute a great impulse to enhance the assessment of
social-emotional constructs, especially in children and youth.
Moreover, new methods of assessment have been proposed, some
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of them with more accumulated evidence than others in the area of
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social-emotional assessment (e.g., forced choice response format
vs. biodata). However, all of them provide opportunities for mea-
suring social-emotional skills as most of them have been used
successfully in related areas like personality assessment, aim to
approach the multidimensional characteristic of social-emotional
constructs, consider within- and between-individual differences,
and take into account the influence of the environment when
measuring the behavioral manifestation of the skills.
Next Steps and Assessment Recommendations
This review discussed the conceptual and methodological chal-
lenges for the assessment of social-emotional skills, further identify-
ing opportunities to improve their measurement. Better assessment
tools will improve monitoring of social-emotional development in
education as part of the teaching curriculum, help identify early
deficits or risk factors of problem behavior, and ultimately contribute
to individuals’ well-being, resiliency, and achievement of adaptive
outcomes. In conclusion, five concrete recommendations directly
follow from this discussion.
First, this review documented the heterogeneity of existing
social-emotional skill frameworks, often with overlapping though
differentially labeled skills. An overarching taxonomy of social-
emotional skills was proposed, of which the domains are closely
related to the Big Five personality framework, in line with empir-
ical research (Kyllonen et al., 2014; Primi, Santos, et al., 2016).
This five-dimensional framework accommodates more specific
skills that have been identified across various social-emotional
frameworks and focus more on positive strengths than on difficul-
ties. The proposed framework is meant to serve as a starting point
and an integrative effort to build agreement on those social-
emotional skills that are important for fostering child and youth
well-being. Such consensus will guide the further development of
this area, and will help this field connect with different disciplines
in psychology where social-emotional dimensions have been tra-
ditionally measured using multiple approaches, such as in clinical,
educational, and developmental psychology.
Second, this outline also made clear that social-emotional skills
are a construct category that shows strong conceptual and empir-
ical associations with other cognitive and noncognitive individual
differences’ constructs, such as personality traits, emotional intel-
ligence, and cognitive abilities. The prefix “social-emotional” is
preferred over “noncognitive” because the skills referred to are
often blends of cognitive and noncognitive factors. A skill like
“collaboration,” for example, involves noncognitive elements such
9
as “social initiative,” “reciprocity,” “trust,” and “respect,” but also
requires processing of information and cognitive resources (Bar-
tram, 2005; John & De Fruyt, 2015). The noun “skills” is used as
a more neutral term that is acceptable by a broad audience,
referring to skills’ malleability, building on contemporary knowl-
edge of the development of personality characteristics and abilities
(Specht et al., 2014).
Third, social-emotional skills are frequently assessed through
self-reports using Likert scales and these will remain an important
source of information (e.g., for formative assessment purposes,
among others). Different methods to increase the validity of Likert
scales were suggested, including acquiescence correction to con-
trol for response styles, and the use of anchoring vignettes as a way
to learn how respondents use Likert scales or correct for potential
group-reference bias. There remains work to be done, however, on
the use of anchoring vignettes, to further examine under what
circumstances anchoring vignettes correct for group reference bias,
and how this correction relates to other individual differences such
as, for example, verbal ability.
Fourth, several alternative methods to assess social-emotional
skills were suggested, complementing Likert-based tools. Forced-
choice assessments are a viable alternative, but can be challenging
for younger children when they are required to rank or choose
among multiple response alternatives. Forms of ambulatory assess-
ment and also SJT-based assessments have been suggested as
methods that may expand the research agenda of social-emotional
skill development considerably. Indeed, these methods open a new
window on the dynamics of social-emotional skills, calling atten-
tion to both between- and within-individual differences in social-
emotional skill manifestation. In addition to differences in skill
development between persons, there is now an opportunity to learn
about the variability in social-emotional skill use within the stu-
dent. In addition, ambulatory and SJT assessments have the po-
tential to provide information about the situation wherein social-
emotional skills are manifested. Situation descriptions are an
inherent part of the SJT approach, whereas ambulatory methods
can capture in vivo situational excerpts (e.g., through registering
an audio or video sample). Currently, ambulatory assessments and
SJT methods are already frequently used in clinical assessment and
industrial/organizational contexts, though they have large potential
for the assessment of social-emotional skills in development and
education as well.
The use of rubrics has been recommended in this overview as an
elegant way to describe increasing levels of skill mastery that may
reflect developmental stages of a particular skill. Ambulatory and
SJT assessments include the potential to add a more dynamic
component to such rubrics, providing the opportunity to evaluate
whether students’ skill manifestations are flexible and in line with
particular situational demands and constraints. The evaluation of
such fine-tuning and dynamic use of social-emotional skills was
not possible before and would add a significant layer of potential
to current assessment approaches. Ultimately, such dynamic func-
tioning is what humans makes unique and different from machines,
and assessment should be conducted exactly at this level.
Fifth, rating-based assessments will have to be complemented
by more objective and task-based assessments. Such objective
tools and methods will be especially required for high stakes
summative assessment purposes, for example, to evaluate whether
students have reached predefined levels of social-emotional skills
 10 ABRAHAMS ET AL.
stipulated in the school curriculum. Objective methods will further
enable researchers to investigate the normative course of social-
emotional skills, as well as to evaluate interventions that can help
individuals optimally realize their skill potential and well-being.
The field has started to develop such more objective and task-
based assessments of social-emotional skills and some of these
were reviewed. The challenge in this subfield will be to make a
clear distinction between whether a student “can” or whether he or
she “will” spontaneously manifest a particular skill when neces-
sary. Task-based measures often focus on the first, whereas Likert-
based ratings frequently ask whether one typically does, so it is
probably recommended in many cases to examine their joint
effects on the outcomes of interest.
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In summary, the current review has tried to make a case for a
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better conceptualization of social-emotional skills to promote
adaptive functioning in children and adolescents and to facilitate
the inclusion of social-emotional skills as end-points in educa-
tional curricula, among others. We have highlighted possible av-
enues for the challenging task to improve social-emotional assess-
ments, and reviewed innovative assessment approaches that have
been developed in the recent past. There still remains much work
to do, and we welcome future efforts to advance the field of
social-emotional skill assessment further.
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Received June 8, 2017
Revision received February 16, 2018
Accepted February 21, 2018 䡲