Assessment and monitoring of safety in special education schools is imperative to establish and maintain a safe environment in which students can develop academic and social-emotional skills. The present study describes the development of a student self-report measure, the Safe at School questionnaire. Factorial validity, reliability and…

Introduction: In persons with severe to moderate intellectual disability (SID), no valid and reliable diagnostic instrument is available to determine PTSD. In this study, a new instrument was evaluated: the Diagnostic Interview Trauma and Stressors -- Severe Intellectual Disability (DITS-SID). Methods: DITS-SID, Aberrant Behavior Checklist and…

Schools carry the important task of fostering democratic values like equality and tolerance among students. This study examined to what extent a valid and reliable measurement instrument can be developed to gain insight into students' attitudes towards democratic values and what can be concluded based on this measurement. We constructed the…

Adaptive teacher support (i.e., support that is tailored to students' understanding) is considered crucial for students' learning. Previous research examined support adaptivity mostly in small-scale, observational studies without distinguishing between theory-based facets of support adaptivity. Yet, students' perceptions of different aspects of…

The objective of this study was to develop and validate an instrument measuring the perception and interpretation of several distinct musical features (pitch, tonality, timing, loudness, and timbre). Therefore, we developed the Implicit Tonal Ability Test (ITAT), a listening test containing 49 multiple-choice items. A total of 233 children aged 6…

Background: Body experience is an important facet of psychosocial functioning and health. However, to date no test exists to measure body experience in adults with mild intellectual disability and borderline intellectual functioning (MID-BIF). We therefore adapted the Body Experience Questionnaire (BEQ) to this group, resulting in the BEQ-mb, and…

Background: Direct support professionals' (DSPs') attitudes toward nutrition are important for supporting a healthy lifestyle of persons with intellectual disabilities. However, there are no instruments to measure it. The aim of this study was to compose a questionnaire and determine its internal validity. Method: The previously validated Health…

Background: When novice teachers start working in a school, it is vital that they are aware of the moral aspects of the work environment and can use their moral abilities to make their work not only successful, but also right. To map these moral abilities, we developed the Moral Authorship Questionnaire for self-assessment. Objective: This paper…

Background: Monitoring the implementation of new interventions, as in this study Non-violent Resistance (NVR) for the use in residential youth care settings, is mandatory in order to evaluate, adjust and refine the implementation process where necessary. Objective: As there is no instrument for such monitoring of NVR available, the authors…

When in 2014 the "STEM Career Interest Survey" (STEM-CIS) was developed, the researchers could check this instrument with other target audiences. Also, the question remained if the instrument was applicable for both boys and girls. This article describes the development and validation of a Dutch language version of it, called the…

In the Netherlands, all schools are required to develop a wellbeing and social safeness policy. Despite this legislation, there is currently no adequate instrument available to measure the wellbeing and social safeness. Therefore, the present study investigates the psychometric properties of the Wellbeing and Social Safeness Questionnaire (WSSQ).…

The "School Refusal Assessment Scale" (SRAS) was developed to identify four factors that might maintain a youth's school attendance problem (SAP), and thus be targeted for treatment. There is still limited support for the four-factor model inherent to the SRAS and its revision (SRAS-R). Recent studies indicate problems with the wording…

Subconsciously, experienced teachers make use of situated knowledge: knowledge that is connected to, and arises from, the interactions between the physical environment where the action takes place and a material body acting in that environment. Since situated knowledge is important in day-to-day teaching to solve incidents, it should be taught in…

On the basis of a validation study of a new test for assessing low-achieving adolescents' reading comprehension skills--the SALT-reading--we analyzed two issues relevant to the field of reading test development. Using the test results of 200 seventh graders, we examined the possibility of identifying reading comprehension subskills and the effects…

The Remote Associates Test (RAT) developed by Mednick and Mednick (1967) is known as a valid measure of creative convergent thinking. We developed a 30-item version of the RAT in Dutch with high internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.85) and applied both Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory (IRT) to provide measures of item…