Practitioner’s Guide to Empirically Based Measures of School Behavior

This work provides clinicians and researchers with reviews of a compendium of instruments used for assessing children's and adolescent's behaviour, social, or attentional problems in the school setting. Although the primary focus is on the evaluation of problems manifested in the school setting, many instruments reviewed are multi-informant and are used to evaluate children across settings. All instruments reviewed have psychometric support. The contemporary assessment of children's behaviour problems has moved away from exclusive reliance on rating scale interview methods to functional assessment of children in the classroom. As such, a chapter on functional assessment, which refers to identifying the function of the behaviour with regard to reinforcement contingencies, is included in the book. Also included is a chapter on curriculum based assessment methods for evaluating academic skill deficits relative to the child's curriculum. This chapter is included given the increased risk of academic weaknesses for children with behaviour or attentional problems.