Measuring the Use of Trauma-Informed Care in Education Settings: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Trauma-informed care is increasingly being used in education settings. Along with an increase in the use of trauma-informed care comes a need to measure the use of trauma-informed care. We conducted a scoping literature review to explore what measures of trauma-informed care in schools are being used, with a focus on which aspects of trauma-informed care the tools are measuring. By searching the published literature, we identified 20 unique tools used to measure the use of trauma-informed care. We found that most of these tools focused on individual responses as opposed to system-level responses to trauma, and that components of trauma-informed equity-centered care were primarily not included in the tools. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and end with future directions to improve the measurement of trauma-informed care in educational settings.