Parents of prospective students often ask: “What are the chances of success?”

To ask, of course, is to raise other prior questions: “What is success?” “How would you know it when you see it?”  In other therapeutic endeavors, it's much more obvious what questions to ask.  Considering heart surgery, a parent would ask for the odds of a child's surviving the operation, the risks of untoward events, the chances for better pump function, reduced pain, and a prompt return to normal activities at school, at home and among friends.   These would be measurable, objective indicators of a successful cardiac outcome.

For the kind of therapeutic work we do at the Academy, however, not all the wanted outcomes are readily measurable or objective.  How measure "happiness" or a better "attitude?"  This is harder to measure than simply counting how many cardiac patients get off the operating table alive.  Yet we have to try, albeit some relevant evidence is subjective, even anecdotal. We think it may be helpful for parents if we describe "typical" passages through the Academy, rather than just reporting the objective fact, i.e., the "average program duration" for graduating MA students.  We will list the percentage of enrolled students that graduate, but we think it also may help to post valedictory addresses from parents and students at graduation, and samples of letters from alumni and their parents. 

Other metrics will be more objective. We have systematically collected parents' ratings of the Academy's clinical and academic performance and satisfaction (or lack thereof) with sons' and daughters' outcomes. We will summarize results from ongoing one-year follow-up surveys. We will rehearse parents' and students' ratings (before and after) of the quality of their own parent-child relations. We will cite parental ratings (before and after) of daughters' and sons' psychiatric symptoms, academic and interpersonal functioning, and (yes, even) happiness. We will record teachers’ aggregate ratings of students’ shifts in academic maturity and students' changed grade-point averages (GPAs) as they progress through the program.  We post an on-going list the colleges to which MA graduates have been accepted.

Finally, we will document the results from our own measures of Academy students' shifts in maturity.  Some years ago, unable to find an extant measure to gauge the clinical changes we wanted students to make, we had to create the Montana Adolescent Maturity Assessment (MAMA)--a measure that MA parents have now helped us to test over the past four years by completing hundreds of MAMA-p ratings of the maturity of their own sons and daughters--before, during and after completing the MA program.  We have presented these data at national meetings (NATSAP and IECA) and will present summary graphs here--along with simultaneous parental ratings of sons' and daughters' academic and interpersonal functioning, psychiatric symptoms and need for medication. 

Coda:  In the New Year (2011) we expect to refine a staff version (MAMA-s) of this rating scale at MA, and then our research team--with major financial support from the Montana Academy Foundation--hopes to apply the MAMA-s to a sample of several hundred public high school and elementary school students.