Behavior ratings of emotionally disturbed children by teachers,parents, and school psychologists

Emotional disturbance was rated by teachers, parents, and the school psychologist for a group of 104 children diagnosed as severely emotionally disturbed. Teachers were found significantly more severe in their judgments than the school psychologist on the Behavior and Socialization scales of the Referral Checklist, but not on Communication. The teacher rating profile was also found to deviate from parallelness from the other raters with increased severity in the Behavior scale. None of the nine correlations between judges on the same scales was significant. Interpretations and possible implications are offered.     

The others-concept and friendly and cooperative behavior in children

This study explored the predictability of friendly, cooperative behavior of school children over a 5-week period. The basis for the predictions was the children's others-concept, as measured by the Paired Hands Test. Structured observations of groups of children working together on assigned tasks were made during five consecutive weekly sessions, each lasting approximately 15 minutes. The observations were obtained by recording each session and categorizing verbal statements as to their task-relatedness and friendliness. This procedure allowed comparisons between children with high and low others-concepts with respect to these behaviors. In three tasks out of five the high others-concept children showed a higher frequency and greater proportion of task-related and friendly behaviors. The tasks which best differentiated between children with high and low others-concepts were those which seemed to be the most challenging and exciting, and which called for the highest degree of group cooperation. The study demonstrated how friendly and cooperative interactions among small groups of children are influenced by a combination of their others-concept and situational factors.     

WISC-R examiner errors: Cause for concern

While errors on the WISC-R are conceived primarily in terms of internal consistency and stability over time, examiners make mistakes that contribute to the inaccuracy of test scores. Studies to date mainly have investigated general scoring errors, rather than specific items most prone to error. Investigation of graduate students' test protocols indicated numerous scoring and mechanical errors that influenced the Full Scale IQ scores on two-thirds of the protocols. Particularly prone to error were Verbal subtests of Vocabulary, Comprehension, and Similarities. More importantly, specific items on subtests in which numerous mistakes occurred were noted, as well as the most likely type of error for each item. These findings have implications for the education and training of assessment specialists.     

Using Skill Tests to Identify Successful and Unsuccessful Basketball Performers

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship of 21 selected basketball skill tests to successful basketball performance. The 21 skill test items were administered to 70 boys ranging in age from 12 to 17 attending the 1977 University of Minnesota-Duluth basketball camp for boys. Based on the ratings of three high school and three college coaches, camp participants were designated as successful (n = 32) and unsuccessful (n = 38) performers. The stepwise discriminant analysis procedure was used. Six skill tests were identified as significantly contributing to discriminating between group membership. These tests, in order of the magnitude of their standardized discriminant function coefficients, were (1) speed pass, (2) zig-zag run, (3) free jump, (4) side step, (5) front shot, and (6) zig-zag dribble. It was concluded that a basketball skill test battery comprised of these six test items would objectively measure basketball playing ability and discriminate between successful and unsuccessful performers.