General FAQs

Our tools and resources are designed to promote resilience in and support the social and emotional development of young children (birth through 5 years old), and to help promote resilience in the adults caring for them.

Yes; you can use the DECA on our web-based platform, called the e-DECA. Click here to learn more.

Our resources are available in English, and many are also available in Spanish. Click here to see what we offer in Spanish.

The DECA may be completed by the child’s teacher/caregiver and parent/family member. The qualifications that an adult must have to complete an assessment include (1) knowing the child for a minimum of four weeks, and (2) spending sufficient time with the child over those four weeks to feel confident answering all of the questions on the assessment.

Programs and agencies should confirm that existing policies and procedures already in place for obtaining parental consent would cover the assessments. Often, parental consent is granted through a blanket letter at time of enrollment or at the beginning of each year, which lists and describes all of the assessment tools and evaluations to be conducted throughout the year. However, if the general consents don’t emcompass your intended use of the data, we believe it would be best practice to obtain consent. Click here for sample parental consent letters that can be adapted to meet your program’s needs.

Yes. The use of the assessment and strategy resources can be adapted to best meet a program’s specific needs. We recommend that assessment results lead to strategies and planning to promote children’s resilience. Our assessment and planning programs are designed to simplify that process. However, if programs choose to use the assessments in conjunction with other strategy resources, that is certainly appropriate. In addition, programs may choose to use our strategy resources independent of the assessments.

All of the strength-based assessment and strategy resources we offer are appropriate to support you when children use behaviors that challenge you. Our most popular and successful resource is FLIP IT. Click here to learn more.

All of the above! Our philosophy/approach is centered around promoting social and emotional development in all children, as well as the protective factors and resilience of all children and the caring adults in their lives. Healthy social and emotional development, protective factors and resilience helps, in turn, to prevent challenging behaviors.

Our assessment and planning resources are designed to fit within existing systems, filling the gaps, to help promote healthy social and emotional development in young children. Our assessment and planning programs are not a curriculum, but provide strategies and planning activities that will enhance the overall quality of a program, as well as help build the protective factors of children and adults. A variety of crosswalks and alignments are available here.

We offer not just nationally standardized, valid and reliable assessment tools, bu also entire systems of strategies and planning for children and classrooms. Teachers and parents can work together as partners to implement our assessment and planning process. Our assessment results are linked to strategies for both the school and home environment. Our tools can be used to monitor and measure outcomes for children, assisting programs to meet standards and, more importantly, making a difference in the lives of children and their families.

The value of the DECA is that it not only provides psychometrically-sound measures of within-child protective factors in individual children and groups of children, but it can also be used for progress-monitoring and program evaluation purposes. Progress-monitoring consists of administering an assessment, such as the DECA, multiple times throughout a school year in order to examine how children are responding to a particular intervention or program. The goal of progress-monitoring is to obtain feedback during the intervention or program so that the nature of intensity of the intervention or program can be adjusted to maximize the chance of a successful outcome. Progress-monitoring may occur multiple times over the year. In contrast, program evaluation refers to examining the progress or chance observed over a defined period of time, such as a school year, to determine overall program effectiveness. This document will provide guidance on using our assessment tool to both monitor the acquisition of protective factors of young children and to evaluate the impact of intervention.

No! Our resources provide information about how to properly implement in a variety of settings, so training is not required, nor is it completely necessary. That being said, we do offer a variety of training/professional development options for those programs that desire it. We offer many opportunities! Learn more here.

Our team offers a variety of professional development options. Learn more here, or you can reach out to our Director of Professional Development Debi Mahler at [email protected] or (610) 574-6141.

Yes! We provide professional development on a variety of topics related to the social and emotional development and resilience of young children (birth through 5 years old), as well as promoting resiilence in the adults who care for young children. Learn more here.

Check out our schedule of live free webinars here, and we also offer free on-demand webinars here. We also encourage you to keep an eye out for us at various conferences! Check out where we’ll be (and where we have been in the past) here. Additionally, we invite you to check out our YouTube channel with lots of great content.

We offer virtual train-the-trainer courses for our FLIP IT content (challenging behaviors in young children), and for our Building Your Bounce content (adult resilience). Check out our Virtual Trainings Schedule to see when our next deliveries are. Want a train-the-trainer for just your team? Reach out to Director of Professional Development Debi Mahler at [email protected] or (610) 574-6141.

CEUs may be offered for select trainings. Additional credits may be available depending upon your state and your college degree and/or licensing/certification. Reach out to Director of Professional Development Debi Mahler at [email protected] or (610) 574-6141 for more information.