School psychologists have considerable measurement expertise when compared to physicians, social workers, and other professionals delivering psychological services to schools and children. However, psychologists are far from qualified to portray themselves as measurement experts. It is important to know psychologists' boundaries of measurement…

Criticism of the construct "children and families at risk" has grown substantially in recent psychology and education literature. The practical and the semantic issues surrounding this criticism are explored in this paper. Four major objectives are presented here: (1) to provide psychologists with an increased level of awareness relative…

A school psychologist describes the experience of designing a database management system to keep daily records of services provided to students and parents. Information in the database included: dates, type of service, and time spent. A system such as this provides instant access to accountability data. How to create and maintain the database is…

School psychologists are currently being called upon to spend more time in direct and indirect interventions to assist students with academic and behavioral problems. This study examined if time used for interventions is related to school psychologists' effectiveness. A group of Iowa school psychologists (N=91), who in turn identified up to three…

An inservice consultation program between teachers and a school psychologist was designed to establish classroom conditions to improve 7th- and 8th-grade students' (N=233) thinking skills. Inservice training conducted by the psychologist emphasized encouragement of ideas, modeling thinking skills, opportunities for practice, and support of diverse…

A survey of 1,300 school administrators and 441 school psychologists examined perceptions of the causes of dropping out (891 administrators returned usable surveys for a response rate of 71.8%; the school psychologists' sample was part of a larger study that had yielded a response rate of 57%). Using a 5-point Likert scale, respondents rated 42…

The complexity and rapid expansion of the entire field of psychology make it appropriate to speak of "psychologies" when acknowledging the need for specialization of training and expertise. Nevertheless, unifying trends (UTs) exist in psychology, even though there can be no single set of theoretical principles to account for all empirical…

One of the important roles of the community psychologist is that of researcher. To determine how well that role is being fulfilled, and to what extent community psychology research conforms to accepted standards of social scientific endeavor, 621 articles published in the American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP) and the Journal of Community…

Performance-based certification for educational professionals has been stimulated by demand for accountability and educational reform. This article suggests simulated situations and situational response testing as a viable means of contrasting individuals across a number of criteria variables in realistic settings. (Author)

This document concerns performance appraisal as mandated by the North Carolina Legislature for all certified educational professionals. It notes that, in 1985, all newly certified professional education personnel, including school psychologists, came under the Initial Certification Program (ICP) requirements which issued newly certified school…

A county (Harris County, Texas) education agency, along with Special Education Directors and Personnel Officers from the county's 24 school districts, identified problems in recruiting special education teachers and such related service personnel as psychologists, psychological associates, educational diagnosticians, speech therapists, art…

This paper is a book review of William M. Phillips, Jr.'s "The School Sociologist: A Need and an Emergent Profession" (Washington, DC: University Press of America, Inc., 1981; 216p. ISBN-0-8191-1946-6. $12.95). Dr. Phillips defines a new professional field and expounds upon the role of the professionals within it. He seeks to combine factual…

This paper presents a functional approach to the performance apppraisal of school psychologists, citing the high likelihood of increased public demand for accountability from human service professionals and a paucity of systematic efforts to appraise the performance of school psychologists as evidence of the importance of this topic. A functional…

In spite of statistics that show that demographically there are increasingly more women than men as people age, and that epidemiologically women are more likely than men to utilize health services, most health services continue to be based on research and training that is both age and gender biased. Few mental health professionals are…

Benefits of hospital-based internship and residency programs for training psychologists are discussed, along with issues concerning licensing or certification. In hospitals, interns and residents are exposed to unusual and diverse forms of physical and mental pathology, as well as contact with a diverse patient population crossing all ages, racial…