Three ‘pilot’ schools participate in faith study with archdiocese

By DAWN PROSSER
Director of Communications
 
Catholic high schools in the Diocese of Sioux City are participating in a three-year pilot program in conjunction with the Archdiocese of Dubuque to attempt to measure faith growth in students over time and using that data in their faith formation approach.
 
“In the Archdiocese of Dubuque, we sought out to identify the basic elements of how people tend to grow in their faith from kids who are unchurched and resistant to kids who are super plugged in and ready to go and everything in between,” explained Kevin Feyen, director of youth and young adult ministry for the archdiocese.
 
His office has been developing a youth faith inventory instrument to measure youth faith development and invited the diocesan Catholic schools to participate.
 
Patty Lansink, superintendent of Catholic schools in the Diocese of Sioux City, said she was interested in working with Feyen due to his expertise in youth faith formation and what he hoped to accomplish with the inventory.
 
“I appreciated his attempts at trying to quantify what’s kind of a nebulous concept … we wanted to help him out,” she said.
 
In the fall of 2023, all seven high schools in this diocese administered the faith youth inventory questionnaire developed by the archdiocesan Office of Evangelization and Discipleship.
 
The instrument
The inventory has 10 questions where students were to select an answer that best describes topics including how they feel about God, learning about their faith, prayer experiences and others. Students could select one of five responses to each question to measure where they are in that aspect of the faith.
 
Sample responses for describing how they felt about God included:

1. I doubt that God is real.
2. I think God is probably real, but I don’t have much to do with God.
3. I think God is real and I try to pray when I need his help.
4. I know that God is real and I want to learn more about him.
5. I fully believe in God and I’m fully committed to living out my faith as God wants me to.

 
Similar to any academic subject, educators will have students at every level of faith formation, which has not always been recognized, the director said.
 
“We can look at a group of 100 math students and group them pretty quickly based on their mathematical competencies. We don’t do that with faith,” Feyen pointed out.
 Bishop Garrigan School Mass - one of the pilot schools.He said although measuring faith formation isn’t as “black and white” as measuring mathematical skills, he felt there was a way to measure the students’ faith and “do the appropriate pastoral response based on that.”
 
“My goal was to have informed people making deliberate choices meeting the needs for our young people,” he said, noting the end result could be better youth ministry and faith formation programs in parishes and schools.
 
Feyen was interested in working with the Sioux City Diocese schools as pilot sites for a more objective response than using the Catholic schools in the archdiocese.
 
“Because (the schools) weren’t our own … they could be honest with me and walk away at the end of the day even if it wasn’t good,” he said of using schools outside of the archdiocese for the pilot program.
 
Once all seven schools administered the inventory, Lansink said three pilot schools were selected for a more intentional study – Le Mars Gehlen Catholic, Fort Dodge St. Edmond and Algona Bishop Garrigan Schools.
 
“We chose those three because they had fairly involved campus ministers/religion teachers that we thought could help with the work because the principals are so darn busy,” she explained. “These pilot schools were doing intentional things to try and form connections with kids and their faith through various activities.”
 
Feyen said the first blanket testing gave the schools and researchers an initial indication of what teens said about where they are in their faith development.
 
“We took those results to all of the teachers and faculty that work with the high school,” Feyen said. “We said this is what we’re learning about the students you’re called to serve and there’s things we can do deliberately to address all these young people and their various needs.”
 
Correlation?
From that first inventory, the archdiocese worked with the three pilot schools to look at the data and set goals to intentionally address certain areas. After the spring testing, they could determine if there was a correlation between those efforts and growth in scores over time.
 
Using the data, a numeric score was assigned to levels of faith development. From there, suggestions were offered by Feyen’s office to schools such as emphasizing care and belonging, spiritual encounters, clarity and accountability.
 
“He’s trying to quantify faith development and see if schools were intentional - not just teaching a religion class, but intentional about building relationships and forming kids – if they would see fruits from their labors,” Lansink said.
 
The archdiocese would work directly with the pilot schools and discuss results and determine why the schools experienced any particular growth in certain areas of formation.
 
“I would say why do you think there’s growth in this area and they would tell me they had a priest who was present on campus who knew and loved our kids,” he said of responses from the pilot schools. “Or that they had faculty who were present to love them (the students) deliberately.”
 
The control schools did not have such consultation from the archdiocese after testing. Feyen said he hoped to see that if the pilot schools had drastic improvements in their inventory scores than the four control schools, then it would show the intentional efforts were productive.
 
Unexpected twist
“It didn’t go as I thought it was going to go,” he said. “The stories I’ve heard since are that pilot schools weren’t the only ones who looked at the data and tried doing something with it. So, the control schools adopted some of this information outside our direct influence … that’s the fun catch.”
 
The 2025-26 academic year is the final year for the study. The schools administered the inventory in September and will take the final assessment in the spring. However, the experiment is already offering a glimpse into what’s affecting youth faith development.
 
“In the last two years, we’ve been able to track with quantifiable evidence that generally, the Catholic schools in (the Diocese of) Sioux City are more favorable to growing in their faith than they were two years ago,” the director said.
 
In the two-plus years of working with the Sioux City Diocese schools, Feyen said the project gives him hope about making a difference in the faith lives of students – one step at a time.
 
“Sometimes we think we are only successful and that I have done my job that the kids here are canonized as saints,” he said. “We can track small incremental moves in the faith journey of a young person and that’s success.”

Cover photo: Walking rosary at LeMars Gehlen Catholic School, one of the pilot sites.