Recent research suggests that school-based kindness education programs may benefit the learning and
social-emotional development of youth and may improve school climate and school safety outcomes.
However, how and to what extent kindness education programming influences positive outcomes in
schools is poorly understood, and such programs are difficult to evaluate in the absence of a conceptual
model for studying their effectiveness. In partnership with Kind Campus, a widely adopted school-based
kindness education program that uses a bottom-up program framework, a methodology called concept
mapping was used to develop a conceptual model for evaluating school-based kindness education
programs from the input of 123 middle school students and approximately 150 educators, school
professionals, and academic scholars. From the basis of this model, recommendations for processes and
outcomes that would be useful to assess in evaluations of kindness education programs are made, and
areas where additional instrument development may be necessary are highlighted. The utility of the
concept mapping method as an initial step in evaluating other grassroots or non-traditional educational
programming is also discussed.