The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) self-report form is a brief 25-item measure that assesses the psychological adjustment of youth. Although widely utilized as a screening tool, a lack of consistent psychometric evidence undermines the SDQ's utility as a sound diagnostic tool for all youth. This study focused on examining the…

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…

Strength-based assessment of behaviors in preschool children provides evidence of emotional and behavioral skills in children, rather than focusing primarily on weaknesses identified by deficit-based assessments. The Preschool Behavioral and Emotional Rating Scales (PreBERS) is a normative assessment of emotional and behavioral strengths in…

A brief 15-item version of the California School Climate Scale (Brief-CSCS) is presented to fill a need for a measure that could be used for periodic monitoring of school personnel's general perception of the climate of their school campus. From a sample of 81,261 California school personnel, random subsamples of 2,400 teachers and 2,400…

We investigated the latent factor structure of the "Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening for Kindergarteners" in Spanish ("PALS español K"). Participants included 590 Spanish-speaking, public-school kindergarteners from five states. Three theoretically-guided factor structures were measured and tested with one half of our…

Assessing and monitoring student progress is becoming increasingly important in classrooms and for accountability purposes. Yet, in order to interpret changes in assessment results from one year to the next as reflecting differences in underlying ability rather than as variations in the measurement, the assessments used should be measuring the…

The perceived impact of mattering is quite accepted in higher education yet has not been well measured with diverse college students. This article describes the development and validation of the College Mattering Inventory with community college and university students. Results and implications for faculty and student affairs professionals are…

The purpose of this study was to test the measurement invariance of the Brief Symptom Inventory's (BSI) secondary factor model across African, white, and Latino Americans using multiple-group confirmatory factor analyses. This study provides an examination of the BSI's validity for use in mental health service research for people with severe and…