Virginia Child Wellbeing Index: Measuring Wellbeing and School Success Among Elementary School Students in Virginia
Existing tools for assessing child wellbeing examined children more broadly as a group. However, the needs and outcomes of children are stage specific. Early childhood and elementary education in conjunction with early childhood neighborhood contexts exert larger effects on adult outcomes than neighborhood contexts in middle childhood and adolescence. The paucity of wellbeing indices for elementary schools in Virginia informed our creation of the Virginia Child Wellbeing Index (CWI) using elementary school attendance boundaries as the geographic level of measurement. Our primary aim was to introduce the newly created index for population-level monitoring of well-being among elementary pupils and highlight the methodology adopted. The secondary aims were 2-fold: 1) Test the predictive utility of CWI by examining the relationship between CWI and Standard of Learning (SOL) scores 2) Determine which of the CWI domains were the strongest predictors of SOL scores. We created the CWI as a multidimensional tool to assess child wellbeing for all elementary schools in Virginia. The CWI consist of 10 domains, which include School Climate/Environment, Student Teacher Ratio, Socioeconomic, Mental Health Support, Clinical Support, Instructional Support, Teacher Quality, Per-Pupil Expenditure, School Safety Resources, and Percent English Learners. We adopted a rigorous approach to measuring child wellbeing, with several methodological improvements to existing tools. Additionally, we tested the predictive power of the index by conducting a multivariate regression analysis, and elucidated domains of the index which predicted SOL scores most strongly.
