Posts

The Move to Application Based Assessment

Image
As School Psychologists we have front row seats to watching technology shape the future of learning, but how is this change impacting our scope of practice?   For students, several districts in the area employ the use of tablets for learning, and some have made the transition to technology so vast that they provide a tablet for each child. For School Psychologists, we have slowly moved away from hand scoring to computer based scoring, and even to online rating scales. Who wants to spend an hour half hand scoring a 150 question rating scale when you can spend 15 seconds running a full online report? There is no doubt that technology has the capacity to increase the efficiency of our jobs, but there is a big difference between using online behavior rating scales and creating a full shift to application-based testing.   There has been a lot of buzz lately about our assessment tools becoming available through an application called Q-interactive. Pearson assessments cre
Post a Comment
Read more

Emotional and Behavioral Disorders, an introduction

Image
This is both my area of interest and expertise, so you can expect several blogs in the future focusing on aspects of this disability targeting an audience with varying knowledge levels. This particular blog is to be considered an introduction and focuses on characteristics, risk factors, and cultural/economic factors with more in depth topics to come.  Although the legal educational term is Emotional Disturbance (ED), these students are often referred to as having Emotional and Behavioral Disorders (EBD) due to the substantial impact their behaviors have on their education as well as the link between behaviors and disorders described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual - fifth edition (DSM-5). These terms will be considered interchangeable in my posts. Although we do not diagnose from the DSM-5 in the educational world, it is necessary knowledge for educators considering students who are identified as ED often obtain clinical diagnoses, including: Bipolar Disorder, Anxie
Post a Comment
Read more