The Functional Behavioural Assessment (FBA) is an investigative process that examines the context of challenging behaviours in the classroom. Information gleaned from the FBA process is used to develop a behaviour intervention plan to address the challenging behaviour and teach a socially acceptable replacement behaviour. However, the FBA has…

The assessment of ecological factors that affect individual mental health or academic functioning is an important component of educational and psychological consultation. Researchers and practitioners have conceptualized such ecological or environmental factors in a variety of ways and from a broad range of perspectives. In this article we…

This paper developed a Democratic Classroom Survey to measure students' perceived democratic environment of the classroom. Perceived democratic environment is one of the most important variables for understanding classroom activity and indeed any type of group activity, but actually measuring perceptions in an objective manner has been…

Recently, within the field of special education, attention has been accorded to the conceptualization and measurement of family outcomes. The Family Quality of Life (FQOL) Scale is an instrument that can be used to measure family outcomes for families who have children with disabilities, and it has been demonstrated to have psychometric validity.…

Although there is agreement that graduating students should be able to function effectively in an increasingly diverse society, there is reasonable difference of opinion regarding how that goal should be accomplished and how progress should be measured. The most pervasive and appealing conventional wisdom is that positive attitudes and behaviors…

The factorial and construct equivalence of subscales assessing parents' and children's perceptions of the quality of their neighborhood was examined in Mexican American and European American families. All subscales (dangerous people in the neighborhood, sense of safety in the neighborhood, quality of the physical environment) demonstrated adequate…

This article presents a new approach to index development, extending the methods used by Townsend, Mack and Lansley and Hallerod to measure deprivation in the developed world. The index combines three "objective" dimensions of deprivation (i.e. monetary, consumption and work-related), and weighs them according to subjective perceptions…

In this article, the authors describe the refinement and preliminary evaluation of the Dimensions of Change in Therapeutic Community Treatment Instrument (DCI), a measure of treatment process. In Study 1, a 99-item DCI, administered to a cross-sectional sample of substance abuse clients (N = 990), was shortened to 54 items on the basis of results…

We used a prepublication version of the Supports Intensity Scale (SIS), the Adaptive Behavior Scale-Residential and Community, and the Inventory for Client and Agency Planning to examine the relationship between support needs and adaptive behavior for 80 people with intellectual disabilities. Dimensionality of the SIS Support Needs Scale (Section…

The purpose of the current study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R) with a large sample (1313 classrooms). We explored both the seven subscales and the possibility of fewer distinct aspects of quality being measured by the scale. The large sample size allowed both…

Computer-supported group-based learning requires that interaction has to be structured within the group; otherwise it will not happen. Also, it is important to pay attention to social aspects of a distributed learning group (i.e. group dynamics); otherwise a good working team will not emerge. This article proposes a process-oriented framework that…

Methodological and conceptual issues arising from a study of student perceptions of secondary school class climate are discussed. Through a pilot study, 113 Likert-type items were collected, consisting of teacher-focused dimensions, classroom-focused dimensions, and instructional practices. Factor and cluster analyses were used at the item level.…

Teacher and administrator responses to the Connecticut School Interview, conducted as part of the Spencerport (New York) More Effective Schools/Teaching Project, indicated (1) that there are a number of correlates which can be considered areas of strength and (2) that steady improvement has occurred in installing correlates in each building and in…

Suggests that intellectual ability is a stronger determinant of academic success than family income, parental education, or socioeconomic status. Maintains that familial influence plays an important role in academic achievement but questions the specifics of that relationship. Includes statistical information on grade variation, siblings, and…

This document consists of four papers presented during a symposium on work force issues moderated by Jan DeJong at the 1996 conference of the Academy of Human Resource Development (AHRD). "Rethinking the Ties that Bind: An Exploratory Study of Employee Development in Utilities in Canada and the United States" (Michael Aherne, David…