Research Initiatives
The Clifton Strengths Institute collaborates with researchers around the world to demystify the strengths development process. Our goal is to demonstrate how engagement, hope, and well-being drive academic achievement and career success.
Strengths Research
We believe that investing in strengths leads to success at home, school, and work. Strengths combine with time, energy, knowledge, and skills to help people achieve important goals. Indeed, focusing on what is right may get you to your desired outcomes easier and faster than simply working to overcome weakness. This hypothesis—Individuals, and possibly schools, will grow more by building on their strengths than by focusing on weakness—is rooted in research from the early 20th century.
- In 1925, Elizabeth Hurlock found that students who were praised for their good work in a math class improved performance by 71%, in comparison to only 19% improvement in the group that was criticized.
Recent field research has shown that quality strengths programming increases hope, self-confidence, and direction and that strengths-based teaching boosts students’ academic engagement and performance.
Through The Clifton Strengths Institute’s new research initiative, we invite people who have identified their strengths via the Clifton StrengthsFinder or Clifton Youth StrengthsExplorer to join us as participants and collaborators. Through online research projects, we will examine the effectiveness of using strengths in novel ways, engaging in strengths meditation, and writing strengths logs.
The School Poll
The School Poll captures the soul of a school by measuring engagement, hope, and well-being. The Poll taps directly into the hearts and minds of American students to determine what drives well-being and achievement. Distribution and discussion of this data will help schools, students and parents create a more hopeful story about American education. When schools use insights gleaned from this data, students and teachers get to do more of what they do best everyday, their well-being and success will matter to the community, and their personal flourishing will leads to school success.
- Engagement items distinguish between high and low performing schools.
- Hope items correlate positively with academic achievement.
- Well-being items estimate the extent to which young people are flourishing.