How should we engage youth in the assessment process?
The YPAT uses a two-stage process for youth engagement to ensure youth feel prepared and empowered to share their opinions:
1) Completion of Youth Feedback Form in Youth Reflection Groups, followed by
2) Participation of selected youth representatives in the Assessment Committee. In the first stage, one or more groups of youth will convene to fill out a separate assessment tool, Youth Feedback Form, which captures youth experiences and perceptions of key standards. The questions are directly related to many of the standards in the full Assessment Form but have been re-worded to better gather youth perceptions. We advise that program staff do not observe or attend this meeting to reduce any pressure youth may feel to answer questions a certain way. Two to three youth are selected from this group to represent the opinions of the youth beneficiaries As the Assessment Committee should only be 5-8 members, this process provides input from a larger pool of youth beneficiaries on how they view the programming, as well as provides time for the youth beneficiaries to consider each question and brainstorm examples of how they see the benchmarks happening in practice.