Letter #49. How Effective Are Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) Programs in Schools?

Research shows that effects of such programs are small and sometimes in the opposite of the desired direction.

Dear friends,

In previous letters (here, here, and here) I reviewed compelling evidence that schools, especially since the institution of Common Core, are a major source of psychological distress among school-aged children. Then, in Letter #48, I pointed out that schools are addressing students’ anxiety and depression not by changing the policies that have caused the distress but by hiring more therapists and adding social emotional learning (SEL) programs to the school curriculum. I noted that U.S. schools are currently spending approximately $2 billion a year on SEL programs. This is big business. I suggested that if schools would lighten up on the homework, dial back on the high-stakes testing, and bring back recesses and some of the other things that used to be fun in school, students’ anxiety and depression would go down, joy would go up, and academic performance would not suffer (and would probably improve).

Now, in this letter, I address the question, how effective are SEL programs in improving students’ mental health?

What Are SEL Programs?

I want to make it clear that I am not writing here about individual or group psychotherapy, presented with confidentiality by well-trained professionals to clients who have asked for such therapy and are free to quit if they wish. Therapy of that sort can occur in offices in schools, just as it can in therapists’ private offices, and research indicates that such therapy is usually (but by no means always) beneficial and sometimes highly so. SEL programs are quite different from that. They are presented to all the children in the school or in specific classrooms, whether the children want them or not, usually by people who are not certified therapists. They are commonly presented by regular classroom teachers who have received some training in how to administer the program.

The theory behind SEL is that all students can benefit from discussions and exercises aimed at making them more aware of their emotions, more able to use cognitive methods to deal with negative emotions, more mindful of their environment, more aware of how their behavior affects others, and more knowledgeable about how to create and maintain healthy relationships. Such programs have been developed for all grades, PreK-12. In some cases, they are separate courses, of varying duration, commonly offered in homeroom in secondary schools. In other cases, they are additives to standard courses. Even a course in algebra might begin with an SEL “check-in” about how people are feeling. (I can imagine lots of discussion about hatred or fear of algebra! I can also imagine the frustration of those who just want to get on with the course.)

In her recent book Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier presents a rather devastating critique of SEL and the general societal trend to treat children as if they are psychologically fragile and in continuous need of psychological care from adults. She suggests that this focus increases rather than decreases kids’ suffering. The book led me to examine the research literature on SEL.

Research into the Effectiveness of SEL Programs

If you read reports by education policy organizations, you might conclude that research shows unequivocal benefits of SEL. For example, a report by the Learning Policy Institute claims that SEL programs have been extensively studied and have proven effective in reducing emotional distress and improving various aspects of behavior, in every grade (Greenberg, 2023). However, a close examination of the research reveals a less rosy picture.

Recently, Christina Cipriano and her colleagues (2024) at the Yale School of medicine published a meta-analysis of 90 research studies conducted in the United States aimed at assessing the effects of SEL programs. Meta-analysis is a method of combining the results of numerous research studies to see if there is an overall significant effect and to estimate the size of the effect. The analysis revealed that those in the programs showed, on average, statistically significant improvements on various measures compared to those in the control (no SEL) condition, but the effects were very small. The effect sizes were just 0.120 for the reduction in emotional distress and 0.159 for improvement in peer relationships. If you know about effect sizes, you know that these sizes are so small as to be regarded by most researchers, for most purposes, as negligible. An effect size of 0.50 is regarded as moderate and a size of 0.2 is regarded as small (see here).

Moreover, these small but statistically significant effects were all based on measures taken immediately after the SEL program ended or while it was in effect. They do not tell us if the effects persisted. Cipriano and her colleagues report that some studies also took follow up measures 6 months or more after the program ended and those showed that the immediate positive effects had vanished. Another problem is that these studies had no way of controlling for possible demand effects, so even the small transient effects observed might simply be changes in how the participants believed they should respond (for an explanation of demand effects, see Letter #45). Meta-analyses such as this one are cited as evidence that SEL programs work by those who sell them, but a critical analysis reveals that the evidence is weak.

Some well-controlled large studies of relatively intense SEL programs in schools have revealed that they can be more harmful than helpful. For example, Lauren Harvey and colleagues (2023) in Australia conducted a study in which hundreds of teens experienced, as part of their school curriculum, an 8-week program that involved training in mindfulness, problem-solving, cognitive reappraisal, exposure acceptance, and distraction techniques aimed at reducing emotional distress. The disheartening result was that those in the program, by self-report, experience significantly more anxiety and depression, poorer quality of life, and poorer relationships with their parents at the end of the program compared to those who were not in the program. All the statistically significant effects were negative.

In another study, a program involving mindfulness training for students ages 11-13 resulted in poorer social and emotional functioning, by the measures used, compared to those in the control condition (Montero-Martin et al, 2022). And in yet another study, the addition to school health classes of training in cognitive methods for reducing negative emotions was found to have no positive effects and some small transient negative effects on measures of emotional distress compared to those in health classes that did not have such training (Andrews et al., 2023).

What Might Account for the Failure of SEL Programs?

SEL programs might fail to be helpful, or even prove harmful, for a variety of reasons. To me, the most salient reasons are the three I list here:

The requirement to talk and think about negative emotions may lead to rumination.

A great deal of research shows that a leading cause of depression is rumination, that is, the tendency to persist in thinking about negative experiences and emotions. People who ruminate are far more likely to become seriously depressed than those who do not. Girls and women tend to ruminate more than do boys and men, and this has been shown to be a major cause of the higher levels of depression in females than in males (Pedersen et al, 2022).

Several controlled studies have shown that therapy interventions, in which people who have experienced a potentially traumatic event are encouraged to talk about that event in a group setting, have the overall effect of increasing subsequent depression and anxiety compared to those not subjected to the intervention (e.g. Bisson et al., 1997; Mayou et al., 2000), most likely because of rumination induced by the intervention. It may usually be better to not dwell on the negative and just go on with life. Good therapists know how to discourage rumination and encourage ways of shortcutting rumination when it creeps in.

The programs may lead some students to apply psychiatric labels to themselves.

Thinking about one’s own anxiety or sadness may lead some to apply a psychiatric diagnosis to themselves. “I have an anxiety disorder,” or “I have depression.” Research has shown that such self-labeling can have the harmful consequence of leading the person to believe there is something inevitable about their anxiety or depression; it’s in their biology. In a recent study with college students, Isaac Ahuvia and colleagues (2024) found that students who labelled themselves as “having depression” were less likely to take positive steps to overcome their depressive symptoms than were those who had initially equivalent depressive symptoms but did not label themselves in this way.

The programs may imply to students that they are psychologically fragile, which can be a self-fulfilling prophesy.

It seems possible that the very existence of an SEL program for students may imply to the students that they are psychologically vulnerable, emotionally fragile. Why else would they need such a program? As I have pointed out in previous letters, the belief that kids are emotionally fragile can make them fragile. To a considerable degree we are what others seem to tell us we are, especially if those others are authority figures.

Imposed training of all sorts in schools is rarely effective.

Here’s a critique I haven’t found in the research literature, but I think is obvious. Nothing taught in school sticks very well. Despite thousands of hours of training in school subjects, students learn very little of what is taught, and what they do learn is most often not retained. Kids are brilliant learners when they really want to learn something and take charge of the learning, but terrible (as we all are) when forced into courses. This is the big difference, I think, between real therapy, which the client has sought and bought into, and SEL programs imposed on kids.

Further Thoughts

This Substack series is, in part, a forum for thoughtful discussion. I greatly value readers’ contributions, even when they disagree with me, and sometimes especially when they do. You will notice in reading comments on previous letters that everyone is polite. Your questions and thoughts will contribute to the value of this letter for me and other readers.

If you have had experiences with SEL, positive or negative, I would like to hear about them. I also wonder if you have further ideas about why SEL programs are not more successful than research has shown them to be.

If you aren’t already subscribed to Play Makes Us Human, please subscribe now, and let others who might be interested know about it. By subscribing, you will receive an email notification of each new letter. If you are currently a free subscriber, consider converting to a paid subscription. I use all funds that come to me from paid subscriptions to help support nonprofit organizations aimed at bringing more play and freedom to children’s lives.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

References

Ahuvia, I. et al. (2024).

Andrews, J., et al. (2023). Evaluating the effectiveness of a universal eHealth school-based prevention programme for depression and anxiety, and the moderating role of friendship network characteristics. Psychological Medicine 53, 5042–5051.

Bisson et al. (1997). Randomised controlled trial of psychological debriefing for victims of acute burn trauma. British Journal of Psychiatry, 171, 78–81.

Cipriano, C., et al. (2024). A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of universal school-based SEL programs in the United States: Considerations formarginalized students. Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy 3.

Greenberg, M. T. (2023). Evidence for social and emotional learning in schools. Learning Policy Institute. https://doi.org/10.54300/928.269

Harvey, L., et al. (2023). Investigating the efficacy of a Dialectical behaviour therapy-based universal intervention on adolescent social and emotional well-being outcomes. Behaviour Research and Therapy 169, 104408.

Mayou, R.A. et al. (2000). Psychological debriefing for road traffic accident victims: Three-year follow-up of a randomised controlled trial. British Journal of Psychiatry, 176, 589–593.

Monetero-Marin, J. et al. (2022). School-based mindfulness training in early adolescence: What works, for whom and how in the MYRIAD trial? Evidence-Based Mental Health, 25, 117–124.

Pedersen et al. (2022). Metacognitions and brooding predict depressive symptoms in a community adolescent sample. BMC Psychiatry, 22, 157.