Reliable and valid assessment of parenting and child behaviors is critical for clinicians and researchers alike, and observational measures of parenting behaviors are often considered the gold standard for assessing parenting and parent-child interaction quality. The current study sought to evaluate the reliability and validity of the Coder…

We review common situations in Bayesian latent variable models where the prior distribution that a researcher specifies differs from the prior distribution used during estimation. These situations can arise from the positive definite requirement on correlation matrices, from sign indeterminacy of factor loadings, and from order constraints on…

District leadership teams perform key roles in building the systems to support schools in the implementation of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS). However, there is a lack of measures for assessment and progress monitoring specific to district PBIS systems. To address this gap, we evaluated the validity of a measure of…

Scale validation is vital to psychological research because it ensures that scores from measurement scales represent the intended construct. Factor analysis fit indices are commonly used to provide quantitative evidence that a proposed factor structure is plausible. However, there is mismatch between guidelines for evaluating fit of factor models…

Tools that assess school supports for highly mobile, military-connected students are lacking. This study describes the development and preliminary validation of the Inventory of School Supports-Parent Report (ISS-PR). Participants were 433 parents (74% female; 62.5% White, 12% Black, 6.5% Asian, 5.5% Pacific Islander, 4% Native American, and 9.5%…

Measuring the quality of classroom-based interactive shared book reading within the early childhood classroom represents a specific dimension of teacher-child interactions that is of great interest to researchers. This interest reflects decades of research demonstrating the benefit of reading to young children in both the home and the classroom.…

Purpose: Psychometrically sound parenting instruments are a critical aid in guiding clinical assessments of adolescent behavioral outcomes, particularly among clinical samples of adolescents. However, there is a paucity of research on these parenting instruments among adolescents with histories of substance use disorders (SUDs) who represent a…

The importance of improving teachers' use of culturally responsive practice (CRP) in the classroom setting has been widely recognized. Although quantitative data on teachers' use of CRP has potential to be a helpful decision-making tool in advancing that goal, little is known about the psychometrics of classroom-based CRP measures, their utility…

The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the parent-report Short Form Positive Family Support Strengths and Needs Assessment (PFS-SaNA). The PFS-SaNA is designed to reduce the time and burden of collaborative mental health screening. Parents of 245 students in the Northwest completed the screener at third, fourth,…

Background: Implementation climate is an organizational construct theorized to facilitate the adoption and delivery of evidence-based practices. Within schools, teachers often are tasked with implementing universal prevention programs. Therefore, they are ideal informants when assessing school implementation climate for initial and continuous…

In this article we examined predictive validity of Student Risk Screening Scale for Internalizing and Externalizing (SRSS-IE) scores for use with elementary-age students (N = 4,465) from 14 elementary schools. Results indicated elementary school students with high levels of risk according to fall SRSS-IE scores -- especially those with…

Organization, time management, and planning (OTMP) skills are behavioral manifestations of executive functioning linked to academic outcomes. Interventions to improve OTMP skills have shown favorable outcomes. The Children's Organizational Skills Scale parent and teacher forms (COSS-P, COSS-T) are widely used for assessing OTMP skills, but there…

Classroom-level quality measures are widely used in early education settings but may mask important variation in learning experiences across children in the same classroom. This study investigates this possibility using detailed data from an observational measure of individual children's learning experiences--Individualizing Student Instruction…

Assessing students' conceptions related to independence of events and determining probabilities from a sample space has been the focus of research in probability education for over 40 years. While we know a lot from past studies about predictable ways students may reason with well-known tasks, developing a diagnostic assessment that can be used by…

Measures of self-regulation may not capture adequate variability in children with low levels of self-regulation. This can limit a measure's ability to accurately demonstrate relations with other variables. The present study addressed this issue with a revised version of the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task (HTKS-R), which includes a new downward…