Follow-up of high-risk children identified in kindergarten through direct classroom observation

Sixty-one children, originally identified at the beginning of kindergarten on the basis of 4 distinct clusters of observable classroom behavior, were evaluated at completion of first grade. Teacher ratings and individual achievement test scores partially confirmed the predictive validity of the original clusters. Children in the nonrisk cluster continued to do well, while children in the high-risk cluster were still doing poorly in some areas. An unexpected finding was that children in another cluster, originally seen as nonrisk, also seemed to be in some difficulty. Concerns about specific aspects of observable behavior were discussed.     

An examination of some bases of teacher satisfaction with school psychological services

Data were collected from a sample of school psychologists and teachers after termination of a teacher consultation experience. Stepwise regressions were performed on the data to determine which psychologist and teacher variables were related to teacher satisfaction with the school psychological consultation. The single most significant main effect on teacher satisfaction was the teacher's perception of the psychologist's facilitativeness.     

The effects of three school psychological consultation modes on selected teacher and pupil outcomes

Six Kansas school psychologists structured their teacher consultation in terms of three consultative modes which varied primarily in the number of follow-up contacts. The findings indicated that follow-up contacts led to greater teacher implementation of recommendations, greater perceived pupil behavior improvement, and greater sense of cooperative planning by the teachers. These outcome differences occurred between follow-up contacts and no follow-up contacts, with outcome differences not occurring between more and less extensive contacts.     

Art instruction and the Goodenough-Harris drawing test in fifth-graders

The experiment was conducted to assess the effect of ordinary school art instruction in human figure drawing on scores of the Goodenough-Harris Drawing Test. Subjects consisted of 44 fifth-grade students attending a suburban parochial school who were members of two preexisting, randomly assigned homeroom classes. Both classes were taught two lessons in art by their regular teachers. The treatment group was taught human figure drawing, and the control group had art lessons excluding figure drawing instruction. The Drawing Test was administered three times, one preinstruction and two postinstruction administrations. Absenteeism reduced treatment and control groups to 14 and 17 subjects, respectively. As predicted, no differences were found in the control group between pretest and postests. The treatment group showed significant gains on both posttests, as well as a significant decline from the first posttest to the second posttest.     

Eventual school placement of kindergartners observed as high risk in the classroom

To determine whether children's observable kindergarten behavior might predict eventual educational risk, 40 of 94 children originally observed in their classrooms at the beginning of kindergarten were followed at completion of second grade. The 40 subjects appeared to be representative in that they did not differ significantly from the total sample in terms of original kindergarten classroom behavior, sex, or race. Using four clusters of kindergarten behavior, significant differences were found in eventual special placement and in ratings of teacher anecdotal material. Attending behavior correlated highly with eventual risk, leading to speculation about early identification procedures.     

Effects of race and social class on preschool performance on the developmental test of visual-motor integration

The visual-motor integration of preschool children who varied in terms of race, sex, and socioeconomic status was assessed using the Beery-Buktenica Test of Visual-Motor Integration (VMI). An analysis of covariance revealed that there were significant main effects for race, sex, and socioeconomic status. Since, at the three- and four-year level, the VMI was normed only on white suburban children, the results of this study seemed to indicate the need for norms for black children at the preschool level. Thus, the second part of this paper reports normative data for black preschool children on the VMI.