The Life Skills Assessment Scale: Measuring Life Skills of Disadvantaged Children in the Developing World

Adversity, including malnutrition, has had irrefutable effects on child development and mental health. India, for example, has approximately 160 million children in poverty. The growth of up to 59% of rural and 48% of all children are stunted. While several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) work with disadvantaged children to increase their life skills and ameliorate the effects of adversity. Yet a simple effective measure of program impact has remained elusive. We used observational data from 1,136 disadvantaged children aged 8 to 16 years to construct a simple 5-item impact assessment scale. LSAS is a simple, quick, yet reliable and valid, measure of the life skills of disadvantaged and developmentally different children and young people in the developing world. Although the scale was developed in India, we envisage that it could be used with disadvantaged children worldwide. This webinar session will discuss the construction and validation of the life skills assessment scale and how life skills can be used as an effective measure of evaluations. The second half of the webinar will address the normative meaning of Lifeskills assessments in the sphere of education and Social, and Emotional Learning.