KU researchers develop, validate tool to identify strengths in students as young as preschool

LAWRENCE — The fields of education, psychology, social welfare and others have increasingly focused on a person’s strengths to help them succeed. But the effort has overlooked the youngest students, as the literature on strengths has focused almost exclusively on older students and adults. 

University of Kansas researchers developed and validated the effectiveness of the Preschool Strengths Inventory, which can be key to helping parents, teachers, clinicians and practitioners capitalize on children’s strengths from an early age to improve their educational and well-being.

“Generally, most of the strengths literature involves college students or adults. Childhood has been a big gap, especially early childhood, and the PSI should be helpful in designing interventions, identifying strengths and filling that research gap once you can accurately identify them in young students,” said researcher Rhea Owens, who earned her doctorate from KU. 

Now of the University of Minnesota-Duluth, Owens conducted and authored studies with Meagan Patterson, professor of educational psychology, and Karen Multon, professor emeritus at KU. 

The work was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. For the article, the researchers conducted three studies. 

The first held several focus groups with parents of preschool age children to identify what strengths they saw in their children. From the qualitative data, the researchers identified strengths, compared them with existing literature on strengths and identified four broad themes with specific strengths within them. The four broad themes included interpersonal strengths, intrapersonal strengths, cognitive strengths and physical strengths.

The second study built on the themes identified in the first and developed the Preschool Strengths Inventory. Researchers built a pool of 234 items related to the strengths identified in the focus groups and reviewed these with psychology experts to ensure items focused on individual characteristics, were positive traits consistent with a strengths-based approach and were not redundant. Ultimately, 37 items corresponding with five key themes were identified. These themes were dynamic, dependable, caring, inspiring and organized.

The third and final study administered the Preschool Strengths Inventory with parents of children ages 3-5. The inventory was administered twice, one month apart, to test the reliability of the measure. Additional measures of personality traits and social skills were also administered one time to test the validity of the Preschool Strengths Inventory. The sample included 210 parents and guardians of children in the target age range from across the nation.

“A big goal for this study was, we were eager to have equal representation from mothers and fathers to get a comparable view from both parents,” Owens said. “Previous research has largely been informed by mothers. We got a national sample of about 50-50. There were five higher order strengths and more specific characteristics within those that were identified.”

The results suggested the PSI is reliable and valid. Having a reliable instrument to identify strengths in young children can help parents, teachers, schools, clinicians, psychologists and other practitioners provide higher levels of support from the earliest stages of life and education.

“The idea is, kids can be good at a variety of things, but we want to capture which might best describe your child,” Patterson said.

By giving parents a tool to identify strengths, they can share that information with educators as students begin school and essentially provide a head start on building on them. 

Previous research in older students and adults has found that when individuals have identified and used their strengths, they have better educational and well-being outcomes. There is also a lack of longitudinal research on strengths and outcomes due to the previous lack of tools to identify strengths in young children. 

The researchers said future work could examine those longitudinal questions, help counselors develop individual and group approaches to students’ strengths and form new versions of the PSI to be used in schools, in addition to the parent version developed in the current research.

With young children, Patterson said, the focus is often on things like making sure they pay attention, that they can sit still and share. 

“All of those things are important, but the PSI focuses on what they are already good at,” Patterson said. “I think it can help parents and teachers identify what kids are good at early on and build on that throughout their education and lives.”