Case Study: Gabriella Charter School achieves improved SEL instruction and schoolwide behavior with Kickboard

Boosting SEL Instruction with Real-Time Student Performance Data

Gabriella Charter School (GCS), a K–8 school in Los Angeles serving a largely low-income, multilingual student body, began the 2018–2019 year focused on strengthening students’ social‑emotional learning (SEL). GCS set three goals—to build fluency of SEL skills and behaviors, to understand and analyze SEL data, and to implement data‑informed SEL instruction—and partnered with Kickboard and the DESSA assessment to capture both day‑to‑day behavior and periodic, norm‑referenced measures of SEL competencies.

Using Kickboard, teachers selected priority behaviors, recorded interactions daily (awarding points for positives and noting corrective behaviors), and shared data with families; GCS administered the DESSA‑mini and full DESSA at intervals and met in grade‑level “pods” to analyze results and adjust priorities. Kickboard’s real‑time data plus DESSA screening drove targeted interventions that produced measurable gains—most notably a marked increase in engagement interactions across grades 3–5 in January and February and improved goal‑directed behavior for an individual student—demonstrating how Kickboard’s tracking supported data‑driven SEL improvements.

Gabriella Charter School