Friday, 14 January 2005 - 8:00 AM

This presentation is part of: Assessment Methods in School Settings

Pilot Test of a School-based Assessment for Youth

Pilot Test of a School-Based Assessment for Youth (S-BAY) Purpose: Schools are increasingly called on to address non-educational barriers to learning as well as serve youth with a variety of individual and family problems. It is necessary for school personnel to have a means to quickly and accurately identify aspects of a child's functioning that place him or her at risk of problems with school success, potential assets that may be utilized to help the child, and appropriate referrals. Few instruments capture both risks and assets. This presentation describes a measure adapted from juvenile justice to general and alternative school populations. The School-Based Assessment of Youth (S-BAY) battery includes a risk assessment, an asset checklist, referral and demographic information. The presentation will include a discussion of the relationships among risks, assets and referrals. Methods: Data were collected by school social workers and counselors through semi-structured interviews and recording likert-type responses on paper and pencil instruments. The S-BAY was piloted with 40 youth in grades 1-12 in a midwestern suburb. We used the scale structure of the original measure to construct 11 risk scales and conceptual grouping of items to construct seven asset scales. Internal consistency of the scales was good, with only three of the scales having reliability coefficients slightly less than .7. Results: Most of the problem indexes failed to correlate highly (r = .3 or greater) with referrals in similar domains with the exception of Family and Parenting (r = .415) and Educational/Vocational (r = .405). These correlations are in the expected direction, with greater number or severity of problems being associated with a greater number of referrals in the domain. All of the other correlations that are fairly large are inverse, reflecting an association between higher numbers of problems and lower numbers of assets in several domains, as well as higher numbers of referrals and lower numbers of assets. For these youth, problem severity does not correlate highly with referrals in a number of domains, nor does possession (or the lack thereof) of assets. Additional data collection is required to further refine the instruments and increase their utility. Implications for Practice and Policy: The S-BAY is designed to assist in identifying risks at individual, family and school/community levels as well as assets at various levels that might be called on to remove barriers. Having valid and reliable means to assess risks and assets is one necessary step to targeting services to ameliorate problems such as nonacademic barriers to learning. Further, identifying needs in a population of students would be useful information to feed into community planning of supports for families of children and youth. In addition, the instrument may be able to identify both protective and promotive factors for youth in the school setting.

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