Mapping the landscape of social and emotional learning analytics

Educational research is increasingly implementing and studying new approaches for assessing attributes that go beyond conventional assessments of students’ cognitive ability. Despite decades of research, there remains a lack of consensus in describing these skills or attributes, variously termed “non-cognitive skills”, “21st century competencies”, “personal qualities”, “social and emotional learning skills”, and “soft/core skills”. Regardless, these skills and qualities reflect dimensions of learning that are broader than conventional curriculum knowledge. The importance of such skills has been well established in contemporary literature as highly relevant for success in school, university, the workplace, and engaged citizenship more broadly. The relatively new fields of learning analytics and educational data mining have introduced numerous novel methodologies to education research. This work has served to advance assessment models for social and emotional learning skills. Building on one of the most referenced social and emotional learning frameworks, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of learning analytics methods for measuring skills such as creativity, critical thinking, or emotional regulation, among others. We recognize that the potential of learning analytics to measure SEL is largely under-utilized and pose possible ways to advance work in this domain.