ACT Tessera

ACT Tessera is a comprehensive assessment system designed to measure six social and emotional skills. The assessment is taken online and helps provide students, parents, teachers, and schools a holistic picture of students’ strengths and weaknesses. Feedback and playbook activities are provided that are designed to help students improve their skills in each of the six areas.

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Tessera Six Social and Emotional Skills

  1. Organization / Responsibility: The extent to which a student is reliable, responsible, and dependable, pays attention to detail, and fulfills school (and related) obligations.

  2. Tenacity / Grit: The extent to which a student expends effort and establishes and maintains personally challenging achievement goals.

  3. Teamwork / Cooperation: The extent to which a student is pleasant, cooperative, sensitive to others, easy to get along with, and has a preference for associating with other members of the school community.

  4. Composure / Resilience: The extent to which a student is poised, flexible, and able to cope with pressure, stress, criticism, setbacks, and personal and school-related problems.

  5. Curiosity / Ingenuity: The extent to which a student is open-minded, thoughtful, interested in different types of students and their points of view, accepting of differences in fellow students, innovative and creative in one’s school (and extra-curricular) work, and enjoys the process of thinking about and solving school problems.

  6. Leadership / Communication Style: The extent to which a student is assertive, persuasive, enthusiastic, and independent; somewhat related to a student’s level of sociability.

Tessera 1.0

A selection of schools administered ACT Tessera during the 2016-2017 academic year. All schools reported on completed the assessment by June 2017. Two forms were administered - one to middle school students in grades 6-8 and one to high school students in grades 9-12.

Middle School Form

Fourteen schools participated yielding a total of 2,852 students. Students took ACT Tessera online during a class session that was designated by their schools. Schools allotted one class period for completion of the assessment, and the great majority of students were able to complete the assessment during that time. Students were allowed to take longer than one class period if necessary.

Two weeks after students completed ACT Tessera, they were given their individualized student reports, and schools were provided with roster reports.

High School Form

Eleven schools participated, yielding a total of 2,142 students.