Pre-K SEL Scoping Review: Purpose and Research Questions

If you have spent a morning in a Pre-Kindergarten classroom, you already know the question that drives most of what happens there: how do four- and five-year-olds learn to handle the storms inside their own bodies before language has caught up to feeling?

It is not a question a teacher can answer on the fly, and it is not a question any single program in the field has yet fully resolved. Before any new framework can be built, someone has to do the unglamorous work of mapping what already exists — what has been tried, what has been measured, and what is missing.

That is the work Ranya Omran’s 2026 scoping review set out to do [1]. This article walks through the review’s stated purpose, its three guiding research questions, and the scope decisions that shaped both. It is the starting point for any reader trying to understand why the rest of this work was conducted, and what it can — and cannot — be expected to deliver.

The Stated Purpose: Mapping, Not Ranking

Reviews of the published literature serve different functions depending on what kind of question the reviewer is asking. A systematic review asks which programs work best, ranks evidence by strength, and produces verdicts on intervention efficacy. A scoping review asks something more foundational: what does the field actually contain? Omran’s review is explicitly the second kind [1].

The review’s stated purpose is to map the published literature on behavioral modification and social-emotional learning (SEL) frameworks for children aged three to five — identifying the frameworks that exist, documenting their structural features, recording their outcomes, and tracing the gaps a new framework would need to fill [1].

The word “map” is doing real work here. The review is not built to declare a winner among Second Step, PATHS, Conscious Discipline, or PBIS. It is built to show how the entire terrain is organized, where the strong evidence sits, and where the empty spaces are.

That distinction matters for a reason described by the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR): scoping reviews exist precisely because some questions are not yet ready for evidence ranking [2]. When a field has many programs but no consensus on which structural features matter most, what is needed first is an inventory — a clear, transparent account of what has been built. Without that, every subsequent quality assessment is premature.

A9 — What Is a Scoping Review (PRISMA-ScR)?

Why a Map Was Needed Now

The case for mapping the Pre-K SEL landscape in 2026 rests on a familiar set of stakes. Pre-Kindergarten children are expelled at a rate three times higher than any other grade level in American schools — somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 children removed from publicly funded Pre-K programs every year [3].

Black Pre-K children are suspended at a rate 3.6 times higher than their White peers, a gap that, as the review argues, has more to do with the absence of structured support than with behavior itself [4]. And as of the most recent national survey of relevant scope, only about 40% of Pre-K classrooms in the United States were implementing any structured SEL program at all [5].

These numbers explain why the question of what works in Pre-K behavioral education is not academic. They also explain why a map matters. If most classrooms are not running structured programs, and if the programs that do run are unevenly distributed, then the first responsibility of a researcher is to be clear about exactly what choices exist — and what choices do not yet exist at all.

A1 — Why Are Four-Year-Olds Being Expelled?

The Three Research Questions

Three questions guided the review from the beginning [1]:

1. RQ1 — Frameworks: What behavioral modification and social-emotional learning frameworks currently exist in the published literature for Pre-Kindergarten children aged 3 to 5?
2. RQ2 — Outcomes and measurement: What outcomes have been measured, and what measurement tools and data-collection systems have been used across these frameworks?
3. RQ3 — Structural and methodological gaps: What structural and methodological gaps exist in the current literature that a new Pre-Kindergarten behavioral framework would need to address?

Each question does a different job. Read individually, they are descriptive. Read together, they form a sequence that moves the reader from inventory, to evidence quality, to the design specifications a future framework would need to meet.

A Quick Comparison

RQ1: What Frameworks Exist for Ages 3–5?

The first question is the most basic — and the most necessary. Before anything can be said about whether Pre-K SEL is working, someone has to define which programs are actually in play. The review limits its scope to peer-reviewed studies published between 2000 and 2024 that name a specific framework, curriculum, or program rather than describing individual teacher practices in isolation [1].

That decision is deliberate. There are many things a teacher can do in a classroom on a given morning — none of which appear in a published study, and none of which can be transferred from one teacher to another without a structure to carry them. By restricting RQ1 to named frameworks, the review separates the question of “what teachers do” from the question of “what the field has built that can be scaled, replicated, and evaluated.”

The frameworks named in the review’s discussion span a familiar set: CASEL as a field-defining vocabulary; Second Step as a widely scaled scripted curriculum [6]; PATHS for emotional competence [7]; Conscious Discipline as a teacher-mindset reframe [8]; and PBIS as a tiered behavioral structure [9]. RQ1 was designed to catch all of these, plus any program meeting inclusion criteria that the search would surface.

A6 — The Major SEL and Behavior Frameworks Today

RQ2: How Have Outcomes Been Measured?

The second question pushes deeper. Identifying which programs exist is one thing; understanding how each program has been evaluated is another. RQ2 asks the review to document the outcome categories that the literature reports on — behavioral, social-emotional, regulatory — and the specific instruments researchers have used to measure them [1].

This question matters for a reason that becomes more obvious the longer you sit with it. The strength of any claim that a given program “works” depends entirely on what was measured, how it was measured, and who did the measuring.

The review’s preliminary screening identifies a small set of instruments that appear repeatedly across the literature: the Social Skills Rating System, the Behavior Assessment System for Children (BASC-3), the Devereux Early Childhood Assessment (DECA), and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) [1]. Each is a rigorous tool. Each also requires training, structured administration time, and specialist availability that most classrooms do not have on a regular Tuesday morning.

RQ2 is the question that exposes this mismatch. It does not ask whether classrooms have data; it asks whether the data the field relies on is the kind classrooms can actually generate.

A19 — The Measurement Problem

RQ3: What Structural and Methodological Gaps Exist?

The third question is the one the entire review is built to answer. RQ1 and RQ2 are the inputs. RQ3 is the synthesis: across everything that exists and everything that has been measured, what is the literature missing that a Pre-K classroom — in real conditions — would actually need?

The review’s discussion frames the answer around four structural features [1]: integrated multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) architecture embedded within a Pre-K SEL curriculum; an educator-operable quantifiable rubric; somatic self-regulation instruction calibrated for three- to five-year-olds; and substitute-teacher-ready protocols.

Each of these gaps is treated in depth in its own piece. What matters here is that RQ3 is the question that licenses the entire conversation about gaps — without it, the review would be an inventory and nothing more.

A20 — The Four Missing Pieces (HUB)

What These Questions Together Are — and Are Not — Designed to Do

A scoping review is built around the questions it can answer. It is equally defined by the questions it deliberately leaves alone. Omran’s review is transparent on both sides of that line [1].

What the Review Is Designed to Answer

The three research questions, taken together, are designed to produce four kinds of clarity:

• A defined inventory of frameworks operating in the 3–5 age range within the search window.
• A description of the outcomes the field has chosen to measure and the tools used to measure them.
• A categorical taxonomy that organizes the frameworks into structurally meaningful groupings.
• A gap analysis that identifies the structural features missing from any single existing framework.

What the Review Is Not Designed to Answer

The questions are equally clear about what they do not attempt:

• They do not rank frameworks by efficacy. That work belongs to systematic reviews and meta-analyses, which depend on quality assessment the review explicitly does not perform [1][2].
• They do not test a new intervention. The review is preparatory work, conducted in support of a forthcoming action-research thesis on the author’s developing framework, the Steady Minds Curriculum — a project currently in pilot, not a validated program [1].
• They do not deliver a final inclusion count. The preprint is explicit that the search and screening are still in progress, and that final numbers, the PRISMA-ScR flow diagram, and complete descriptive statistics will be added prior to journal submission [1].

That last point is worth pausing on. Readers approaching the review should expect qualitative directional findings — “the largest category,” “a smaller body of literature,” sample sizes ranging “from a single classroom of 18 children to multi-site surveys involving thousands” [1] — rather than precise totals. The conceptual conclusions are stable; the numerical specifics are pending.