The Holistic Student Assessment (HSA): Establishing Norm-Referenced Measures to Identify Students Who Show Atypical Strengths or Struggles

TITLE:  The Holistic Student Assessment (HSA): Establishing Norm-Referenced Measures to Identify Students who Show Atypical Strengths or Struggles

Introduction: The identification of socio-emotional risks and resiliencies is crucial to developing more effective assessment tools and for improving strategies promoting positive outcomes for at-risk youth both in school and during out-of-school time.  This study uses the Holistic Student Assessment (HSA) to measure processes important to academic achievement and students’ social-emotional well-being.   The HSA is a 90-item measure with 14 subscales.  The HSA was examined in relation to the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), an internationally known 25-item measure containing 5 subscales: Hyperactivity/inattention; Conduct problems; Peer relationship problems; Emotional symptoms; and Prosocial behavior.  In this study, we validate the HSA and establish norm-referenced measures to identify students who show atypical struggles and strengths.

Sample/Methods:  Participants were 534 youth who attended summer learning programs in 2012 or who were attending school in a metropolitan city in the Northeast in the fall of 2012.  The sample was limited to middle school students enrolled in grades 5 to 8.  Approximately, 51% of the sample was male and the distribution of students across grades was similar. The majority of the participants were considered economically at-risk and demographic characteristics of the sample were reflective of the school district.   HSA subscales were standardized by gender and grade-level and converted to Z-scores (i.e., standard deviation scores).  Students who scored 1 or more standard deviations (SD) in either direction from the mean (i.e., 0) were assigned a strength or a struggle score of 1 based on the direction of the scale for each of 14 HSA subscales.  Total strengths and struggle scores were calculated for each student.  Students were categorized based on the number of strengths and struggles they exhibited: low = 0 to 1, moderate = 2 to 5 and high = 6 or more.  Multiple regression and analysis of variance (ANOVA) examined the relations between strength/struggle categories and the SDQ.

Results:  The average number of strengths was 2.4 (SD = 2.9) and the average number of struggles was 2.2 (SD = 2.2).  Over 18.2% of students were considered high need (low strengths/ high struggles) and 19.5% were classified as low need (high strengths/ low struggles).   Findings suggesting that the HSA subscales and our classification schemas were related to the SDQ in theoretically expected ways will be presented.

Discussion/Implications:  The implications for assessment tools and intervention are discussed. Our findings further strengthen the validity of the HSA.  The use of norm-referenced HSA measures may make it easier for schools and programs to identify students who could benefit from intervention services and could strengthen “needs assessments” to more effectively target and tailor services.