Educators and educational support staff are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of systematic efforts to support students' social and emotional growth. Logically, the success of social-emotional learning programs depends upon the ability of educators to assess student's ability to process and utilize social-emotional information and use…

The "Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale" (DERS) is an established self-reported measure of emotion regulation difficulties. Recently, a brief 16-item version of this scale--the DERS-16--was developed. The goal of the present study was to extend the research on the DERS-16 by evaluating the reliability and validity of the Persian…

This study described the development of the "Social Skills Improvement System Social Emotional Learning Edition Rating Forms" (SSIS SEL RF) for teachers, parents, and students. This new multirater assessment is a reconfiguration of the SSIS Rating Scales items inspired by the CASEL Social Emotional Competency framework. The internal…

The "Self-Determination Inventory--Student Report" (SDI-SR) was developed to address the need in the field for new, theoretically aligned measures of self-determination. The purpose of this study was to establish the most robust and efficient set of items to assess the self-determination of adolescents with and without disabilities on…

Although the majority of students receiving special education services for emotional disturbance (ED) receive a significant amount of instruction in general education classrooms, evidence-based practices for educating students with ED in these settings have yet to be identified. As a result, school-based practitioners must primarily rely on…

The conceptual foundation and initial psychometric evidence are provided for the "Instructional Coaching Rating Scales" and "Interaction Style Scales--Teacher Forms." These forms are part of a multicomponent online assessment system designed to evaluate the effectiveness of coaching skills and interactions that support the…

The purpose of the present study was to conduct an initial validation of the Positive Family Support--Strengths and Needs Assessment (PFS-SaNA) for elementary school children. The PFS-SaNA is designed as a universal screener wherein parents report on common areas their children may need additional support. Parents of children attending one…

Contemporary mental health assessment conceptualizations focus on both well-being and distress. This study presents initial validation information for the "Social Emotional Distress Survey--Secondary" (SEDS-S), which was designed for school-based complete mental health screening that employs brief self-report measures of well-being and…

School systems are the primary providers for the increasing number of children with mental health needs. School-based universal screening offers a valuable way to identify children that would benefit from school-based mental health services. However, many existing screening systems rely on teacher ratings alone and do not incorporate student…

This study investigated the reliability and validity of Part 1 of the Informal Decoding Inventory (IDI), a free diagnostic assessment used to plan Tier 2 intervention for first graders with decoding deficits. Part 1 addresses single-syllable words and consists of five subtests that progress in difficulty and that contain real word and pseudoword…

While educators and researchers agree on the crucial role of literacy motivation for performance, research on methods for accurately assessing adolescent reading motivation is still uncommon. The most used reading motivation instruments do not attend to the multiple content areas in which adolescents read. The present study examines a new…

Research validating mindfulness-based interventions with youths and in schools is growing, yet research validating measures of youths' mindfulness in schools has received far less empirical attention. The present study makes the case for and reports on the preliminary development and validation of a new, 15-item, multidimensional, self-report…

The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is a 25-item screening measure for emotional and behavioral problems in children and adolescents aged 4 to 16. Structural equation modeling was used to test the five-factor structure of teacher and parent ratings on the British version of the SDQ in a community sample of 501 Canadian children aged…

The "Screening Test for Emotional Problems-Self-Report" (STEP-S) was designed to assess students aged 10 to 17 years referred for wide-ranging emotional disturbances categorized under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act. Preliminary analysis indicated that subscale coefficients alpha ranged from 0.76 to 0.85 and…

We reported findings of an exploratory validation study of a revised universal screening instrument: the Student Risk Screening Scale--Internalizing and Externalizing (SRSS-IE) for use with middle school students. Tested initially for use with elementary-age students, the SRSS-IE was adapted to include seven additional items reflecting…