Social and Emotional Learning and Early Literacy Skills: A Quasi-Experimental Study of RULER

Abstract

RULER is a pre-K–12 systemic approach to social and emotional learning (SEL) that supports educators in cultivating emotion skills and provides them with pedagogical principles and tools to help them explicitly teach social and emotional skills to students. The current study tests whether preschool-level access to RULER was associated with growth in early literacy skills using a sample of 1051 preschoolers in 95 classrooms across 19 community-based centers in a small urban northeastern US community. The Preschool Early Literacy Indicators were collected three times over an academic year by district staff. Multi-level growth modeling with inverse probability weighting revealed that children in preschools with access to RULER grew significantly more in their early literacy skills than children without access to RULER—an end-of-year difference equivalent to 0.25 standard deviations, 95% CI [0.14, 0.40]. The current study demonstrates that RULER may promote young children’s early literacy skills.