A project directed by Christina Hinton at The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard brings together Research Schools International Inc. (RSI), PlayVerto, and Sesame Workshop — leaders in play-based learning and measurement — to develop an engaging and accessible tool for assessing flourishing in children ages 5-8.

The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard has developed and validated flourishing measures that support the study and promotion of flourishing broadly defined. In recent years, the program has partnered with RSI to create and test flourishing measures for adolescents ages 12-18 and children ages 9-11. 

To iteratively develop the measure of wellbeing in children ages 5-8, RSI and Sesame Workshop will select an advisory group of 8 key experts on child development. This group will include researchers who bring expert academic knowledge on children, practitioners who have experience working with children ages 5-8 on a daily basis, and relevant policy-makers.

The advisory group will be engaged to envision innovative approaches for asking children in this age range about relevant domains of flourishing using playful, technology-based approaches that do not require literacy skills and effectively sustain the attention of young children.

Play Verto will build a prototype of a virtual play-based flourishing measure. Based on advisory group feedback, RSI and Play Verto will then pilot the measure with 100 children ages 5-8 in the US and the UK and interview the children about their experiences using the tool.

As a culmination to this project, an open-access academic article that shares the flourishing measure for children ages 5-8 is planned to be published. In addition, the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Flourishing Network, which hosts a global network of interdisciplinary professionals working on flourishing, will hold a public Youth Flourishing Measures virtual event to disseminate the youth flourishing measures, including the tool this project aims to create.