This month’s e-newsletter focuses on the Developmental Assets Profile (DAP), an individual or group assessment that measures young people’s strengths across the eight asset categories and in five context areas: personal, social, family, school, and community. It consists of 58 items and takes 10-15 minutes to administer. It has been used by researchers, both nationally and overseas, as a component of the research design. You will learn about two research projects in the stories that follow. The DAP is also being used by counselors who work directly with individual youth. We hope these stories offer you some ideas you can use in your own work.
The Developmental Assets Profile: Individual/Group Assessment that Measures Young People’s Strengths
A Search Institute assessment tool that measures an adolescent’s experience of the 8 broad categories of Developmental Assets™—the positive experiences and qualities essential to raising successful young people—can provide youth-serving practitioners, researchers, and clinicians valuable insight of the positive influences and experiences in the lives of the youth they serve… CLICK HERE to read more about the Developmental Assets Profile
Using the Developmental Assets Profile (DAP) in the Philippines
The Educational Development Center (EDC), based in the northeastern United States, is an international nonprofit that works on projects with the goals of “enhancing learning, promoting health, and fostering a deeper understanding of the world.” With 325 projects that it manages in 35 countries around the world, the EDC is a wealth of research and resources. One of these projects is a collaborative effort among Dr. David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University, the EDC, and Search Institute’s Dr. Arturo Sesma, using the Developmental Assets Profile (DAP) to work with out-of-school youth in the Philippines.
Binghamton, NY, Explores the Assets in its Neighborhoods
Geography and Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping are not normally things that we associate with Developmental Assets®. Neither are evolution or the biological sciences. But the Binghamton Neighborhood Project in Binghamton, New York, is not your normal asset project. “The Binghamton Neighborhood Project (BNP) is a collaboration between Binghamton University (BU) faculty and community partners to understand and improve the quality of life in our region,” reads the BNP website. Dr. David Sloan Wilson and his colleagues at BU have shown how the occurrence of Developmental Assets is affected by complex human social behavior and something similar to the short-term evolutionary process in humans.
Read the rest of this article
Visit the Binghamton Neighborhood Project website
Visit David Sloan Wilson’s blog.
Millard Schools Use the DAP District-Wide
The Millard school district in Omaha, Nebraska was first introduced to the Developmental Assets Profile (DAP) in 2005. They began by administering it to at-risk students and students that had been placed on long-term suspension for drug or alcohol use, being of the opinion that a strength-based approach had the potential to show positive results with this group. It was not long, however, before parents and teachers of other students began asking about the DAP. Since then the DAP has been quickly gathering supporters among schools in Omaha.
Using the DAP with At-Risk Students
We are all familiar with what our system terms the “at-risk students,” the students who seem to get into trouble no matter how much help they have, no matter how much attention they receive. Many have troubled home lives. Some have problems with drugs and alcohol. Sometimes it is violence that becomes the issue. Whatever it is, many of these students confront us with problems that seem impossible to solve. How can we help show these students their strengths when it almost seems that they have none?
