Teacher resistance to school-based consultation with the school psychologist: An analysis according to school level and model of identification for special education services

Consultation is promoted throughout school psychology literature as a best practice in service delivery. This method has numerous benefits including being able to work with more students at one time, providing practitioners with preventative rather than strictly reactive strategies, and helping school professionals meet state and federal education mandates and initiatives. Despite the benefits of consultation, teachers are sometimes resistant to this process.This research studies variables hypothesized to lead to resistance (Gonzalez, Nelson, Gutkin, & Shwery, 2004) and attempts to distinguish differences between school level (elementary, middle and high school) with respect to the role played by these variables and to determine if the model used to identify students for special education services has an influence on resistance factors. Twenty-sixteachers in elementary and middle schools responded to a demographicquestionnaire and a survey developed by Gonzalez, et al. (2004). This survey measures eight variables related to resistance to consultation. No high school teachers responded to the request to participate. Results of analysis of variance indicated a significant difference in the teaching efficacy subscale with elementary teachers reporting more efficacy in teaching than middle school teachers. Results also indicate a significant difference in classroom managementefficacy with teachers who work in schools that identify students according to a Response to Intervention model reporting higher classroom management efficacy than teachers who work in schools that identify students according to a combined method of refer-test-place/RtI combination model. Implications, limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

INCREASING PARTICIPATION IN THE CLASSROOM FOR CHILDREN WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS

Active participation is as essential a skill to children with autism as it is for children without autism, as children are expected to engage in these skills both in and outside the classroom. Without participation skills, children are at a disadvantage when it comes to school and other settings, such as extracurricular activities and the workforce. Recent research has shown that there are interventions available that aim to improve the social skills of children in the home and in the school. These interventions can be delivered in varying forms with the primary caregiver as the interventionist, the specialist as the interventionist, and naturalistic interventions. The purpose of this study was to investigate one of the naturalistic interventions, the Competent Learner Model, and determine its effects on the participation and social skills of students with autism. Three middle school male students diagnosed with autism from a rural northeast middle school participated in the study. They were assessed using the Competent Learner Repertoire Assessments of the Competent Learner Model and the adaptive measures of the Vineland-II and ABAS-II. The results showed improvement for one of the three students and little to no improvement for the other two students.

An action research strategy for selecting and conducting program evaluations.

Describes a strategy for school psychologists to use in selecting the types of program evaluation required to meet system needs. Dimensions of program evaluation—target, purpose, and stage—relevant to school psychologists are described and defined and combined into a conceptual framework indicating 48 different types of program evaluation. The proposed model incorporates relevant aspects of existing program evaluation strategies and action research, affording practitioners a strategy for selecting and conducting program evaluations. Suggested steps for implementing the action research strategy, as well as a hypothetical example of its use, are offered.

Spinning Song

More than twelve years ago, during the car rides to school, my paternal grandmother, or Obasan as she is known in our family, first began telling me her stories about living in the Philippines during the Japanese Occupation. At the time, I did not know much about World War II, but her stories about being captured by the Japanese soldiersfascinated me. Years have passed, and only recently did I really begin to grasp not only the poignancy of these accounts, but also their importance in a larger context. The absence of first-hand narratives about World War II and the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines from the point of view of a Filipino woman is problematic, and I hope that my grandmother’s story can fill this hole in war literature. There are two main parts to the narrative. The first eight chapters of my thesis are about the early years of the Japanese Occupation. During this time, Obasan and her familylived a relatively peaceful life, with the exception of a few troubling encounters with the Japanese. The last seven chapters recount the Liberation of the Philippines and the days when Obasan and her family were held captive by the Japanese. The primary sources for this thesis are the interviews I have conducted with my grandmother over the course of this year and her own handwritten memoir that she composed in the last two decades. I focus specifically on the three chapters that she wrote about the war. I have also included poems written by women and historical background on the Philippines and World War II. Spinning Song is what I call a hybrid-memoir, as it retells Obasan’s stories about the war and explores the ways in which our experiences as grandmother and granddaughter intersect. More importantly, it is my way of preserving the legacy of my grandmother and paying tribute to the woman who has shaped much of who I am today.