The Devereux Student Strengths Assessment (DESSA) comprehensive system: Screening, assessing, planning, and monitoring

The Devereux Student Strengths Assessment (DESSA) and the DESSA-Mini are intended to be psychometrically sound and practical measures of social-emotional competence for use in school and out-of-school-time (OST) settings. These strength-based behavior rating scales yield a variety of information designed to support the large scale implementation of social and emotional learning programs. This paper discusses 1) the context for the development of measures, 2) the choice to use a nationally-normed, adult-completed behavior rating scale as the format for assessing student social-emotional competence, 3) the psychometric properties of the DESSA and the DESSA-Mini, 4) some challenges to assessing social-emotional competence in applied settings, 5) examples of how the DESSA and DESSA-Mini results have been used to inform practice decisions, and 6) future research and development needs for social-emotional assessment.