Schools are a primary setting for the provision of services to children with social, emotional, and behavioral problems. School social workers serve a vital role in identifying, assessing, serving, and referring students suffering from myriad mental health problems, including depression. Starting with a discussion of gathering valid assessment…

Background: There is little information on the psychometric properties of instruments for assessing family care burden in adults with intellectual disabilities (ID). The aim of this study is therefore to analyse the usefulness of the 'Subjective and Objective Family Burden Interview' (SOFBI) in the assessment of principal caregivers in Spain.…

Junior high school teacher Mary Rice designs a consumer research unit that cultivates students' critical reading and thinking skills. As students learn how to develop and revise criteria for evaluating the reliability of online information, they read customer reviews, research products, and present their findings orally.

Cross-cultural adaptation of study instruments is a difficult, time-consuming, but arguably cost-effective process. If conducted properly, it has the advantage that the translated study instruments are accurate, easy to understand, accessible, and culturally appropriate to the target audience and produce reliable and valid data. This article…

Purpose: To demonstrate the internal reliability and discriminative validity of the Language Use Inventory for Young Children (LUI; D. K. O'Neill, 2002), a newly developed parent-report measure designed to assess pragmatic language development in 18-47-month-olds. Method: To examine internal reliability, the LUI was completed by mail by 177…

We reviewed the five top-selling introductory assessment textbooks in both general and special education to identify topics contained in textbooks and to determine the extent of agreement among authors regarding the essentialness of topics within and across discipline. Content analysis across the 10 assessment textbooks yielded 73 topics related…

The National Staff Development Council (NSDC), a private, nonprofit association, has outlined high standards for educator professional learning. One demonstration of NSDC's commitment to the goal of ensuring all schools support and use high standards for professional learning is the organization's investment in developing an instrument to assess…

Although measures of student ratings of instruction have been developed and examined empirically, students' attitudes about the utility of these ratings have yet to be meaningfully quantified. Using survey responses from 1229 students at a major Canadian university, we developed a psychometrically sound measure of the usefulness of student…

Objective: To develop a child victimization survey among a diverse group of child protection experts and examine the performance of the instrument through a set of international pilot studies. Methods: The initial draft of the instrument was developed after input from scientists and practitioners representing 40 countries. Volunteers from the…

There are concerns in the literature that the use of case-based teaching of anatomy could be compromising the depth and scope of anatomy learned by students in a problem-based learning curriculum. Poor selection of clinical cases that are used as vehicles for teaching/learning anatomy may be the root problem because some clinical cases do not…

In this article, the community of inquiry cognitive presence model was mapped to a recently developed semistructured approach to online discourse called SQUAD to detect aspects of critical or higher-order thinking online by cleaning online message transcript through the use of code-recode. It is argued that using code-recode in the way suggested…

Although portfolio assessment is becoming increasingly popular, it may not survive unless portfolio scoring can meet the demands of large-scale assessment standards. The results of studies of interrater reliability with large-scale portfolio assessments have been mixed. This paper reports the scoring results of a nationwide portfolio pilot in…

The purpose of this study was to investigate differences in Texas Teacher Appraisal System (TTAS) scores when considering the scores of the first four individual domains (Instructional Strategies, Management and Organization, Presentation of Subject Matter, and Learning Environment), the sum of the scores of Domains I through IV, and the overall…

To help teachers develop an awareness of how they structure a discussion, an instrument was constructed called the Assessment of Classroom Interaction Dynamics (ACID). Two expert judges and 26 trainees then participated in a study (1) to estimate interrater reliability between expert judges in the use of the ACID, (2) to assess the validity of the…

In fall 1978, a study was conducted at Eastfield College to determine the desirability of using a writing sample as part of the student assessment and advisement process. At an orientation session attended by 1,643 entering students, an entry-level assessment was conducted, consisting of a writing sample; an objective English composition test; the…