Whole-Child Development, Learning, and Thriving

Abstract

On the pages that follow, a broad alliance of leading scientists and scholars speaks with a unified voice about the urgency of integrating social, emotional, and academic dimensions of learning to improve student outcomes.Under the aegis of the National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, the 28-member Council of Distinguished Scientists actively collaborated on and unanimously endorses The Evidence Base for How We Learn: Supporting Students' Social, Emotional, and Academic Development. These consensus statements of evidence-drawing from brain science, medicine, economics, psychology, and education research-unite the country's leading scholars of learning in calling for the full integration of social and emotional learning with academic instruction.The Consensus Statements of Evidence affirm and explain that social, emotional, and cognitive domains are interconnected in the learning process. This powerful consensus presents a compelling case for policymakers and educators to confidently move forward in addressing social and emotional dimensions of learning as part and parcel of achieving excellent academic outcomes in K-12 education.The consensus statements and the research behind them are summarized in this brief, written by Stephanie M. Jones and Jennifer Kahn with the active participation of the entire Council of Distinguished Scientists.The Aspen Institute is grateful to the scientists who came together to align their broad expertise in the public interest. Without their thoughtful contributions, dedicated efforts, and earnest deliberations, this step forward on behalf of our nation's students and schools would not be possible.

The Development of Positive Attributes of Character: On the Embodiment of Specificity, Holism, and Self-System Processes

“…In addition, if self-report surveys remain the only, or even the chief, method used to study character (as they have been), it will be unlikely that physical or behavioral contributions to the whole person will be veridically assessed (Cantor et al, 2021;Clifton, 2020). Accordingly, the holism of the character self-system will be inadequately appraised and, as such, the absence of valid assessments of physical or behavioral variables will nega-tively impact the quality of the assessment of integrated self-system processes.…”

Does Prior Night’s Sleep Impact Next Day’s Executive Functioning? It Depends on an Individual’s Average Sleep Quality

“…These coactions between individual and ecology (i.e., individualcontext coactions) involve biological, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral attributes of the person and their social contexts -all changing interdependently across time (Molenaar, 2014;Overton, 2015;Witherington, 2015). Specific features of the time and place of these coactions for each person create fundamental, person-specific facets of each student's learning trajectory (Cantor et al, 2021;Lerner, 2018;Rose, 2016). Therefore, a students' EF capacity might vary across time and place due to the combination of the variation of their personal and contextual factors (Bornstein 2019).…”

“…That is, if the study of human development is to fully understand the holism of human development and to move towards using this knowledge to describe, explain, and optimize the life course of each person, the dynamic coaction of idiographic, differential, and nomothetic features of each person must be integratively studied (Cantor et al, 2021).…”

“…However, at the between-person level, we did not find an association between EF and sleep, meaning that among this sample of participants, if an individual reported a higher level of quality in general compared to others, the person did not perform better in EF tasks compared to others. Such a finding suggests that comparing each individual to themself might be a more informative way to predict a specific individual's development than comparing a specific individual to others (Cantor et al, 2021).…”

Supporting Healthy Brain and Behavioral Development During Infancy

“…Several frameworks and models have identified the importance of examining and interpreting developmental trajectories from a systems perspective (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006; Cantor et al, 2021; Gottlieb, 2007; Thelen & Smith, 1994). Systems perspectives vary in their features, but all require development to be examined within the multilevel and interacting contexts.…”