Multilingual Students and Social and Emotional Learning Interventions: A Systematic Review

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is increasingly regarded as vital to public education systems, with outsized benefits for students. However, questions remain around how effective or accessible SEL interventions are for linguistically minoritized students, particularly in the United States. We conducted a secondary data analysis on a preregistered systematic review dataset (https://osf.io/6pqx2/) to examine the following: 1) Are multilingual students represented in the global evidence for SEL interventions, and if so, how and in what way? 2) How and in what way are multilingual students represented in the evidence for SEL interventions within the United States specifically? The PRISMA (preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses) criteria guided the original systematic review and identified 424 relevant studies published between 2008 and 2020; 13.4% of included studies (n = 57) reported data on student language status, and of those studies, 56.1% (n = 32) were conducted in the United States. Language status representation was categorized into nine different groups (i.e., language learner services or non-native first language) and coded at the sample (n = 50) and population (n = 21) level. Results highlight the significant lack of multilingual student representation across SEL and the need to center equity at the intersection of language and SEL. Implications for researchers to advance reporting standards of student language status and (re)consider design, implementation, and evaluation of SEL interventions toward supporting linguistically minoritized populations are discussed.