This paper describes the development and validation of an instrument to assess how students deal with emotionally challenging classroom situations (the DECCS Questionnaire). The questionnaire is based on a vignette with one learning and one performance situation in a classroom, and is intended for students in grades 4 to 7. On a sample of N = 639…

The School Refusal Assessment Scale-Revised (SRAS-R) is a widely used measure of the functional conditions leading to school absenteeism. In the present study, we developed a German version of the SRAS-R and investigated its psychometric properties in a clinical sample (N = 62) of referred school absentees aged 11 to 17 years. Results of an…

Teacher-child relationships in early childhood are a crucial prerequisite for children's emotional, social and academic development. Therefore, it is important to be able to measure accurately the quality of interactions among them. The Student-Teacher Relationship Scale (STRS) is a widely accepted instrument in measuring the quality of…

Navigating between cultures in addition to developmental changes and challenges in early adolescence can be difficult. We investigated school, family, and ethnic group as conditions for acculturation and school adjustment among early-adolescent boys and girls. Analyses were based on 860 mostly second- and third-generation immigrant students from…

Modern attempts to explain why some assessment tools are readily adopted by school-based personnel whereas others are not have focused on the concept of usability. Usability encompasses not only the degree to which consumers find an assessment tool to be acceptable, but also the degree to which it is well-understood, believed to be feasible,…

The present longitudinal study aimed to investigate the influence of ADHD symptoms on reading development in elementary schoolchildren. To this end, repeated assessments of ADHD symptoms (teacher ratings of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity) and reading achievement (standardized tests of decoding speed and text comprehension) were…

This longitudinal study analyzed associations of problem behavior with the attainment of developmental tasks in 133 adolescents with visual impairment and 449 sighted peers. Higher levels of initial problem behavior predicted less progress in the attainment of developmental tasks at the one-year follow-up only in sighted adolescents. This…

Objective: Adult "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (4th ed.; "DSM-IV") and retrospective childhood Wender-Utah ADHD criteria are implemented in self-report measures to assess adult ADHD and its required onset in childhood. Yet their dimensional structure and relationship to adult ADHD depressivity is still…

The psychometric properties of a German version of the Questions About Behavioral Function Scale (QABF) (Matson & Vollmer, 1995) were examined in a sample of 522 individuals with intellectual disabilities residing in large facilities participated. The factor structure was first examined by exploratory factor analysis, yielding a…

This study examined the structure, distribution, and correlates of a new measure of self-reported callous-unemotional (CU) traits in 1,443 adolescents (774 boys, 669 girls) between the ages of 13 to 18 years. The Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits was subjected to exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Exploratory…