The Life Skills Assessment Scale: Kennedy, Pearson, Brett-Taylor and Talreja
Our challenge was to find out how the many children on Dream a Dream’s Life Skills programmes in India benefitted.
In western countries, we use development milestones. In India, we set out to design a specialist set of measures simple enough for anybody to use.
Milestones are very simple tasks that measure hugely complex developmental issues. We can ask a child to pile up play bricks which measure complex neurological development. We now only need a set of play bricks instead of a brain scan.
The skill was to design simple tasks that actually measure the effect of Dream A Dream’s programmes. So seven years ago under a coconut tree we started. After much testing, the final paper was published in an International Scientific Journal. The LSAS is a world first, leading the field. Key features:
- Five simple measures that anyone can use
- Measures for one child or whole groups of children
- Which programme works for which child
- Statistically tested, peer reviewed and shown to work
- Standardised: any disadvantaged child entering a programme can be measured to see how ‘damaged’ the child is compared with the other children
- Works for any disadvantaged child anywhere in the world
- Free access and costs nothing to use, just the question sheet and a pencil
- A gift from the Dream a Dream team to the world!
The measure is already in use in different parts of the world.
Simple scoring sheets are available from Dream a Dream, India.
To know more, please visit: www.dreamadream.org
The Journal paper can be found at: https://www.changemakers.com/sites/default/files/competition_entry_form_files/3518_lsas_sbp_journal_march_2014.pdf