The Pennsylvania Department of Education's (PDE's) Office for Safe Schools partnered with REL Mid-Atlantic to conduct a study using data from PDE's school climate survey. This survey, which is available on a voluntary basis to any school in the state, provides a way to track school climate and identify schools that need additional support to…

These are the appendixes for the full report, "Changes in School Climate during COVID-19 in a Sample of Pennsylvania Schools." The REL study analyzed changes in scores from a pre-pandemic year (2018/19) to the 2020/21 and 2021/22 school years, both of which were affected by COVID-19 and related policy changes. These technical appendixes…

This study discusses the development of a basic electronics knowledge (BEK) assessment as a pretest activity for undergraduate students in engineering and related fields. The 28 BEK items represent 12 key concepts, including properties of serial circuits, knowledge of electrical laws (e.g., Kirchhoff 's and Ohm's laws), and properties of digital…

We examined internal consistency and test-retest reliability of a measure of dispositional optimism, the Life Orientation Test-Revised, in 121 opiate-dependent patients seeking methadone treatment. Internal consistency was adequate at baseline (alpha = 0.69) and follow-up (alpha = 0.72). Low socioeconomic status and being on disability were…

Domestic violence survivors encounter numerous barriers and few supports in pursuit of their vocational goals. There is a dearth of research, however, on the vocational supports and barriers salient for survivors. This study aims (a) to assess the psychometric properties of vocational supports and barriers measures with a racially and…

Objectives: This study describes the development and initial validation of the 15-item Ethnic and Racial Socialization of Transracial Adoptee Scale (ERSTAS). Method: Using the model of Boykin and Tom on Black family socialization, the items were developed and validated using two different Asian adoptee samples. Results: Two subscales, ethnic…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the home literacy environment of a nationally representative sample of preschoolers with disabilities and their subsequent receptive vocabulary and reading comprehension skills using data from the Pre-Elementary Education Longitudinal Study. Results from linear regressions indicated…

Battered women's stages of change (SOCs) are examined in this study. First, confirmatory factor analysis and latent profile analysis were conducted on 754 battered women's responses on the Problems in Relationship Scale (Brown, 1998). Factor loadings were strong, and latent variable mixture modeling produces a two-class solution. Second,…

The objective of this study was to develop a screen assessing domains in at-risk and substance-using adolescents. The Adolescent Domain Screening Inventory (ADSI) consists of four subscales: school, family, community, and individual or peer. A convenience sample of 6,661 youths was employed. Analyses included concurrent criterion validity, known…

Two psychometric approaches for the investigation of item bias were employed to examine the performance of four sociocultural groups on six subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - Revised (WISC-R). The sample of 950 students was from Pima County, Arizona. One approach involved the comparison of the psychometric indices of…