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A focus on implementing social and emotional (SE) learning into curricula continues to gain popularity in K-12 educational contexts at the policy and practitioner levels. As it continues to be elevated in educational discourse, it becomes increasingly clear that it is important to have reliable, validated measures of students’ SE skills. Here we argue that framework and design are additional important considerations for the development and selection of SE skill assessments. We report the reliability and validity evidence for The Mosaic™ by ACT® Social Emotional Learning Assessment, an assessment designed to measure SE skills in middle and high school students that makes use of a research-based framework (the Big Five) and a multi-method approach (three item types including Likert, forced choice, and situational judgment tests). Here, we provide the results from data collected from more than 33,000 students who completed the assessment and for whom we have data on various outcome measures. We examined the validity evidence for the individual item types and the aggregate scores based on those three. Our findings support the contribution of multi-method assessment and an aggregate score. We discuss the ways the field can benefit from this or similarly designed assessments and discuss how the assessment results can be used by practitioners to promote programs aimed at stimulating students’ personal growth.

This bow was a concept, commissioned from Ulrich Velthuysen, a Swedish archer. This horn bow could be classified as a post-conquest design from early 14th century AD Mongolia. In this article, I will describe, step-by-step, the gathering and processing of materials, and the construction of this design of horn bow. Unfortunately, there are only a few pictorial representations of what bows may have looked like during 14th century AD Mongolia; although, there are many other variations of bows during this time period with similar characteristics. Bow styles varied from bowyer to bowyer, so while bowyers duplicated basic fundamentals of construction, there were many different methods of construction, and individual styles of bow-shaping. This article also aims to provide a historical background to a modern 2016 reproduction of a composite horn bow dating from the period of the Mongol expansion. The overview of the bow design includes all types of available and valid sources that speak in favour of its construction and other historical solutions these construction decisions were based upon.