Fostering School Success with Standards for Nonacademic Skills

Evidence highlights the importance of social and emotional skills alongside academic skills for success in school and beyond, yet states looking to align early learning standards with those for Grades K–12 often leave out social and emotional skills from the standards for children in elementary, middle, and high school. This report explores the reasons for including social and emotional learning in early education standards, as well as details the five domains of learning—cognition, approaches to learning, social and emotional development, physical development, and language development—and how several states have incorporated them into their learning standards.