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WorkLinks Skills and Values Assessment (WLSVA)
Access World Learning’s WorkLinks Skills and Values Assessment (WLSVA)
This page contains an overview of the WLSVA and a registration form to download the tool for your organization’s use free of charge. The WLSVA is copyrighted under a CC BY-NC-SA (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) license, which allows others to translate our tool for non-commercial use, as long as you credit World Learning and license your adaptation under identical terms.
The WLSVA was created by Dr. Catherine Honeyman and Meri Ghorkhmazyan. Tool validation was led by Dr. Larry Dershem.
World Learning’s WorkLinks Skills and Values Assessment (WLSVA) Tool has been validated as a credible and reliable tool to measure individual- and group-level change over time among youth and young adults in soft skills, earning skills, and certain civic values. The validation process was conducted in Algeria in French. The tool has subsequently been used in other countries and is currently available in English, French, Algerian Arabic, Iraqi Arabic, and Kurdish.
The soft skills index of the WLSVA tool includes 23 questions (covering the constructs of conscientiousness and self-efficacy, goal-setting and perseverance, interpersonal skills, managing emotions, and thinking and planning skills) that have an internal reliability alpha of 0.91, test-retest alpha of 0.89, and a smallest real difference (SRD) of 3.8% meaning that scores must increase more than 3.8% from time one to time two in order to demonstrate real change rather than measurement error.
The earnings skills index of the tool includes 17 questions that measure job search skills and entrepreneurship skills with an internal reliability of 0.85, test-retest 0.90, and SRD of 4.9%.
Finally, the civic values index (covering World Learning’s institutional values of community & civic engagement, intercultural understanding & empathy, social inclusion & justice, and sustainability) has an internal reliability of 0.79, test-retest 0.86, and SRD of 5.5%. Additionally, the WLSVA Tool has been tested for convergent validity with social emotional resilience, using the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-4), showing a significant and expected negative relationship in which higher skills and values scores are correlated with lower perceived stress (F=11.75, df=2, p<0.000), Eta Squared= 0.12).
The WLSVA Tool has also been validated to be used with all indices in combination, for a total of 56 questions, with change reliably detected when there is greater than 3.3% increase in scores from time one to time two, making the tool suitable for language adaptation to new contexts and usage with programming that seeks to detect changes in skills and values among youth and young adults. On average, youth require 15 minutes to complete responses to the full tool.
WorkLinks Skills and Values Assessment (WLSVA) Download Request Form
The WLSVA is copyrighted under a CC BY-NC-SA (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) license which allows others to translate and use our tool non-commercially, as long as you credit World Learning and license any adapted version under identical terms. After submitting your information on this page, you will be able to download:
- The WLSVA tool itself including all 3 sub-indices and 56 items in English and French
- A background report on the full validation process in Algeria
- Access to Algerian Arabic, Iraqi Arabic, Kurdish, and/or other languages under development, upon request
Technical advising is also available on an “at cost” (non-profit) basis for creating an online auto-scored assessment with the WLSVA, as well as to guide adaptation and validation in new contexts. World Learning also advises on soft skills curriculum and programming.
