Holistic Student Assessment: Development of a Tool to Assess Adolescents’ Resiliencies

• In Event: Children’s Social-Emotional Development and Resiliencies: Translating Assessment Into Practice

Abstract

Objectives
We present the Holistic Student Assessment (HSA), a tool through which adolescents report their social-emotional development, risks, and resiliencies. Our first objective is to discuss how the HSA was developed by a university-school partnership, dedicated to making meaningful contributions to youth development, school reform, and prevention. The HSA is used to create resiliency profiles for individuals and groups, and the resiliency profiles are used to engage students in high-quality, evidence-based educational activities and programs in school and after school. Our second objective is to present the HSA's theoretical framework and psychometric properties.

Theoretical framework
The Program in Education, Afterschool & Resiliency at Harvard University is dedicated to “the whole child—the whole day", integrating research, theory, and practice to provide high-quality, evidence-based after-school programs to children. The program integrates research findings and theoretical frameworks from developmental psychology and education to foster adolescents’ resiliencies and their social-emotional development. The theoretical model developed for the program—the Clover Leaf Model—highlights the developmental strengths and challenges that children encounter during the transition from childhood to adolescence (Malti & Noam, 2008).

Methods
The HSA consists of 75 4-point Likert items, on which students report on trust, optimism, emotional control, self-efficacy, self-assertion, interpersonal sensitivity, empathy, reflection, academic motivation, school bonding, and relationship with adults and peers. For each scale, mean scores are calculated to create resiliency profiles, by graphically presenting a student’s or a group’s scores in comparison to her/his reference group (e.g., a school or district).
Over the past 3 years, the HSA has been developed and tested in several studies. For this study, we drew from a database with 613 6th to 8th graders (11 to 13 years). We conducted factor analyses and correlational analyses to determine the psychometric properties and discriminant and convergent validity of the scale scores.

Results
For the different scales, Cronbach’s alpha, as an indication of the scales’ reliabilities, ranged from a low of .42 to a high of .82. (According to our reliability and factor analyses, some questions of the HSA were revised or excluded, and the revised version of the HSA is currently being validated.) The subscales of the HSA correlate with each other in theoretically predictable and meaningful ways, suggesting that the constructs on the HSA have convergent and discriminating validity. For example, children that reported high levels of self-assertion and empathy also reported high levels of peer relationships, whereas children who reported low levels of empathy also reported lower levels of adult and peer relationships.

Significance of the study
There is need for after-school programs and whole-school approaches to prevention to have tools that can be easily and quickly administered and that provide reliable and valid data on children’s risk, resiliencies, and social-emotional development, in order for program staff to engage with students about their individual strengths and needs and to plan programs and activities accordingly. The HSA is an example of how a university-school partnership developed an assessment tool that provides data that is of practical relevance and that is scientifically rigorous.

Authors

• Gil G. Noam, Harvard University

• Tina Malti, University of Toronto

• Martin Guhn, The University of British Columbia