Broadening assessable domains: Lessons learnt from the development of a wellbeing survey

ABSTRACT

Background: The decline of young people’s wellbeing in the UK and elsewhere has become an increasing focus for attention. In this context, it is encouraging to note some evidence suggesting that participation in extracurricular activities may have potential to improve wellbeing. However, the considerable conceptual and methodological challenges involved in the measurement of constructs within this non-traditional assessment domain should be recognised.

Purpose: Against this backdrop, we report on the development of a survey to measure the contribution of taking part in extracurricular activities on young people’s subjective wellbeing and associated soft skills.

Methods: Participants (N = 4,638) were a sample of young people enrolled in a well-known extracurricular award programme in the UK: The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award (DofE). They completed a self-report survey which had been developed to address key areas relevant to the DofE and wellbeing, such as: resilience and overcoming adversity, confidence and self-esteem, and working with others and communication. Data were analysed quantitatively.

Findings: Factor analysis confirmed a reliable three-factor structure of the measure, which produced patterns of results comparable to existing research on wellbeing. The identified factors were ‘General Wellbeing’, ‘Resilience and Confidence’, and ‘Communication (including Leadership and Teamwork)’. Participants largely reported that taking part in DofE activities had improved their wellbeing through increasing confidence, responsibility and their ability to face challenges.

Conclusions: We suggest that both the survey outlined here and the process of development could be used to facilitate more reliable and valid measurements of wellbeing and related soft skills outside of traditional classroom settings. The findings, whilst relating here specifically to the DofE in the UK, will be of interest to policymakers, school leaders and educators internationally who are considering what young people need to build and maintain wellbeing, and thus thrive in life.

KEYWORDS:

• Extracurricular activities
• assessment
• soft skills
• wellbeing
• mental health
• The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award

Acknowledgements

We thank The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award (DofE) for funding this research and kindly allowing us to use this anonymised data for the greater good and research purposes. We also thank NFER INNOVATION for supporting the dissemination.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1. There are, however, limitations to the generalisability of findings from case studies; we acknowledge these in the Discussion.

2. Questions were selected from: Rosenberg self-esteem scale (Rosenberg 1965), Measure of Empathy and Sympathy (Vossen, Piotrowski, and Valkenburg 2015), Social-Emotional Learning Measures (Panorama Education 2014).

3. This was for Gold participants only.

4. On the DofE database, gender was categorised as follows: ‘Female’, ‘Male’, ‘I describe my gender in a different way’, ‘Prefer not to say’ and ‘Unknown’.

5. Those who identified as either male or female were included in this analysis. Cases for which gender was not available (i.e. unknown or other) were excluded here due to small numbers (N= 66) that would not affect the overall conclusions.

6. 5.1% of the respondents were missing for the calculation of the General Wellbeing composite score, 7.3% for the Resilience and Confidence score and 9.9% for the Communication score. Final samples sizes for each of the identified composite scores can be found in the Results section.

7. Note that it is not possible to make comparisons between the values for General Wellbeing, Resilience and Communication as they are calculated from items with different response scales.

8. Please note that the low percentage is a result of selecting the most important effect out of ten possible statements (single response), rather than selecting all effects that applied (multiple responses).

Additional information

Funding

This research has kindly been commissioned and funded by The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, and the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) INNOVATION has kindly supported the dissemination.