Aperture Education promotes the social and emotional competence of all children and youth in school and out-of-school time programs. We do this through the DESSA – a strength-based behavior rating scale that measures social and emotional skills of students in grades K-12. The DESSA can be completed by teachers, parents, and high school students. We are now developing a new version of the DESSA for middle school students to report on their own social and emotional skills and we need your help!
We are seeking middle school students (approx. 6th-8th grades) across the United States to complete the Middle School DESSA Self-Report and provide basic demographic information about themselves. These ratings will be used to select the DESSA items that are the best indicators of positive outcomes for students. They will also be used to create the scoring norms that will enable districts, schools, and programs to compare their students’ social and emotional skills to the skills typically demonstrated by students in the United States.