Assessing the effectiveness of the HAND in HAND programme in promoting students’ and school staff’s social, emotional and intercultural (SEI) competencies and improving the classroom climate requires validly and reliably measuring these target constructs. In previous research, classroom climate and SEI competencies have predominantly been measured using self-report questionnaires. Classroom climate has been defined as the shared perceptions of students regarding their school environment (Cohen, McCabe, Michelli, & Pickeral, 2009; Van Houtte, 2005).”Arguably, surveys can provide good access to these perceptions. More problematic is the assessment of SEI competencies with self-report instruments, because these might be biased due to influences of social desirability (see e.g., Holtgraves, 2004). Furthermore, many people might lack the necessary introspective abilities to accurately estimate their own competence levels. Because of these difficulties, we decided to complement established self-report based measures of SEI competencies with alternative approaches, such as structured interviews, other-reports, vignettes and achievement tests targeting SEI competencies. Selection criteria for instruments were not only high validity and reliability, but additionally also the presumed sensitivity to change - only instruments that are capable to measure change can detect a possible improvement induced by the HAND in HAND interventions. Therefore, we opted for instruments that have been proven to detect changes in other intervention studies and we decided against instruments showing distributions that make detecting change less probable (i.e., due to ceiling effects). We piloted the questionnaire scales in four participating counties (in each country N = 100 teachers and N= 100 students for each of the two questionnaire versions). Whereas the scales’ measurement qualities have already been proven within different countries, none of the respective studies has looked into cross-country comparability (see e.g. Matsumoto & Van de Vijver, 2010) so far. Therefore, the pilot data analyses (in addition to confirming results on reliability, distributions, and structure) will help us find out whether the pre-selected scales provide data that is comparable across different European countries. We will use multigroup confirmatory factor analyses to answer this question. Advantages, challenges and possibilities of assessment of SEI competencies and classroom climate will be discussed and the final instrument for measuring the success of the HAND in HAND interventions will be presented.

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