What Does it Mean to Have Data with a Post-Pandemic Baseline?

A behind-the-scenes look at the process for updating assessments to ensure the best student support 

By Jennifer Robitaille, Director of Research and Development, Aperture Education: A Riverside Insig

With the release of the DESSA 2 for grades K-8, districts now get the only social-emotional skills and resilience system with post-pandemic norms to predict the appropriate tier of student support. Utilizing an assessment with updated norms has a lot of benefits. If educators spend the time collecting data, the data needs to lead to actionable changes that can be reflected in the classroom environment.  

The Process for Updating Assessment Items and Norms 

Let’s start by getting a glimpse into the process of updating assessment content. The authors of the DESSA and our research team reviewed the existing 72 items (“statements”) of the assessment that were initially established through a review of the resilience and social and emotional development literature. The team then looked at the suggested revisions collected from previous DESSA users over the past decade and the items most often skipped by educators completing the assessments. 

After completing this process, the team began to review and revise the original DESSA items to ensure clarity on what educators were asked to report on regarding observed student behavior. Some items from the assessment were removed, others reworded. The team conducted literature reviews to inform the development of new items to cover content areas not previously emphasized in the original DESSA like developing healthy identities. 

This process resulted in a pool of items reviewed by four experts in the field. The reviewers confirmed the classification of items as they were organized into social-emotional competency domains and provided feedback on the developmental appropriateness of the questions for elementary and middle school students. 

An important highlight of this process compared to other social-emotional screeners and assessments? DESSA 2 is a nationally standardized and norm-referenced assessment. The team followed a carefully prescribed process to collect a large, diverse standardization sample that closely approximately the United States population of K-8 students to create the norms for scoring. The normative sample was collected during the 2023-2024 school year making DESSA 2 the only resilience assessment with post-pandemic data. This means that DESSA 2 scores will be representative of K-8 students today. The standardization sample was also used to inform the final selection of social-emotional competence items to make it into the assessment. A final 40 items comprising six essential social-emotional skill competencies made it into the DESSA 2 assessment. If you’re curious to learn more about the whole process, you can download the DESSA 2 manual. 

What The Process Tells Us About Students 

All the work outlined above plays an incredibly important role in ensuring educators have good data about students’ social and emotional behaviors, which in turn enables educators to provide the right interventions earlier to support student resilience. High-quality assessments have several important features, such as a large, diverse standardization sample and evidence of reliability and validity for the assessment tool's intended uses. DESSA 2 was developed with a commitment to strong psychometric qualities, meeting or exceeding the standards put forth by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education (2014). These are important attributes for defensible decision making about educational decisions for students. 

These updates to the DESSA reflect that the world has changed since the inception of the original assessment nearly 20 years ago. With data collected and tested across a sample of today’s student population, our research team has ensured the data educators spend time collecting will be of impact. 

Only by using a research-based and data-driven approach to assessing and addressing each individual student’s social and emotional competencies, reinforcing their existing strengths, and intentionally integrating strategies to close skill deficits, can we ensure that students have the skills they need to be successful in school and in life. 

Learn More 

Interested in learning more about the evidence base behind the DESSA assessments and how this data impacts student support? Watch our webinar with Jennifer Robitaille, Director of Research and Development, and the lead author of the DESSA, and Dr. Lisa Micou, Director of Program Implementation in conversation as they dive deeper into: 

• Why it is important to update screeners and assessments of social, emotional, and behavioral skills. 

• What it means to have post-pandemic baselines. 

• Why evidence-based assessments are necessary for effective MTSS practices. 

• Making instructional planning decisions with DESSA 2 data.
  
• What makes districts successful when planning, launching, and sustaining a screening and assessment implementation plan.