Law, educational reform, and the school psychologist

The law has become a major vehicle for those seeking to reform education. The two areas of reform which most affect school psychologists are the extension of the right to a public education to previously discriminated against and excluded groups, and the extension of the protection of the Bill of Rights to all school children. The potential impact of these areas on the role of the school psychologist is suggested by preliminary findings on one such reform, the right of retarded children to an appropriate education and the guarantee of that right through the provision of procedural due process. Any response to the reform by school psychologists will involve risks and opportunities which must be carefully weighed if a wise choice is to be made from the point of view of both children and the profession.     

Pavlov as a psychologist

American psychologists are informed on Pavlov’s work on conditional reflexes but not on the full development of his theory of higher nervous activity. This article shows that Pavlov’s theory of higher nervous activity dealt with concepts that concerned contemporary psychologists. Pavlov used the conditioning of the salivary reflex for methodological purposes. Pavlov’s theory of higher nervous activity encompassed overt behavior, neural processes, and the conscious experience. The strong Darwinian element of Pavlov’s theory, with its stress on the higher organisms’ adaptation, is described. With regard to learning, Pavlov, at the end of his scholarly career, proposed that although all learning involves the formation of associations, the organism’s adaptation to the environment is established through conditioning, but the accumulation of knowledge is established by trial and error.     

The faith of a psychologist

Pastoral Psychology -     

Law, liability, and the school psychologist: Malpractice and liability

A variety of court decisions and laws relevant to malpractice and liability of school psychologists are presented. Terms are defined and examples of faulty psychological testing, defamation, withholding information, and inferred incompetence are provided. Suggestions regarding litigation and legal defenses are made and issues related to professional liability insurance are discussed.     

School psychologist accountability via PPBS

Accountability for school psychology is presented through the Planning, Programming, Budgeting Systems (PPBS) approach. The nature of goals and objectives in this model are explored in detail. The actual goals and objectives as developed in the Greenwich (Conn.) Public Schools are used as an illustration.     

The school psychologist in action

This department provides the school psychologist with an opportunity to present case studies on children referred for diagnostic appraisal or to describe other individual efforts at programming or remediation. In case reports, the focus should be on the process of assessment and case management. Reports may, in narrative style, summarize the case history, findings, recommendations, method of consultation with teachers and parents or other follow-up services.     

The community psychologist as social planner

The environmental movement may provide a vehicle by which community psychologists can contribute to large-scale ecological change. This paper uses one outgrowth of the environmental movement--the environmental impact assessment process--to illustrate the procedures for input by community psychologists can participate in the environmental impact assessment process to (1) predict the effects of any new project on the demand for treatment services and (2) suggest ways in which a project may be designed to prevent psychological problems and enhance community well-being.     

Chen Li: China's elder psychologist

Chen Li is one of a small group of psychologists in China who trained abroad early in their careers, returned to teach and do research, and continued doing so into later life beyond normal retirement age. His contacts with a number of prominent psychologists in England and Germany in the 1930s, and his inadvertent position at the center of a political row in China in the 1960s, leading to the shutting down of psychology for 10 years, made him historically important. Known for his work in organizational psychology and education, he is a distinguished psychologist and educational leader. Although trained as an experimentalist, he now embraces a broader view of psychology but remains emphatic it should be applied to real-life problems.