The social emotional learning (SEL) approach takes currently an essential part in school-based intervention programs. It fosters not only individual competences but also makes an important contribution to students’ social participation in schools (Reicher & Matischek-Jauk, 2018). The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) names five competence areas, which are of relevance, namely self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills und responsible decision making. There are several evaluations and reviews, as well as meta-analyses (Corcoran et al., 2018; Durlak et al., 2011; Goldberg et al., 2019; Taylor et al., 2017) which are valuable for scientific discussion as well as the evaluation regarding the effectiveness of such programs, at least within a defined framework. Although these meta-analyses provide some important findings, they focus on a) effects regarding social emotional learning (Durlak et al., 2011) b) whole-school intervention programs (Goldberg et al., 2019) c) outcomes from follow-up studies (Taylor et al. 2017) d) academic achievement (Corcoran et al., 2018) for all students. Nevertheless, a closer examination of the effectiveness of SEL intervention programs for students with SEN has not being carried out yet. The presented synthesis therefore focuses on the significance as well as the limitations of SEL programs for these students. For this reason, studies published between 1996 and 2020 where analyzed within this systematic literature review. First results show that it is quiet challenging to clearly assess program evaluations due to several circumstances. Evaluations from programs delivered in the USA seem to have more often a positive effect than those in European countries. These geographical differences regarding the effectiveness may result from various reasons (e.g. transferability of programs from one continent to the other, different school systems, etc.) and have been discussed in the respective evaluations. Other preliminary findings show, that students’ engagement may have a positive effect on the outcomes. Further, the quality of delivering the intervention may have a stronger beneficial impact than other factors.

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