Development and Initial Validation of a Scale Measuring the Beliefs of Educators Regarding Response to Intervention

This article presents information on the development and initial validation of the 16-item Response to Intervention (RTI) Beliefs Scale. The scale is designed to measure the extent to which educators working in schools hold beliefs consistent with the tenets of RTI. The authors administered the instrument to 2,430 educators in 62 elementary schools in the fall of 2007 and 2,443 educators in 68 elementary schools in the spring of 2008. Exploratory, single-level confirmatory, and multilevel confirmatory factor analysis procedures were used to examine construct validity. Results supported a correlated 3-factor model (Academic Abilities and Performance of Students with Disabilities, Data-Based Decision Making, and Functions of Core and Supplemental Instruction) at both the school and educator levels of analysis. Furthermore, the factor scores derived from the model demonstrated significant, positive relations to RTI implementation. Reliability estimates for two of the three factor scores exceeded.70. Implications for research on educator beliefs and implementation of RTI as well as implications for school psychologists supporting RTI implementation are discussed.     

The distinct contributions of age of acquisition and word frequency in auditory word perception

We report two studies of the distinct effects that a word's age of acquisition (AoA) and frequency have on the mental lexicon. In the first study, a purely statistical analysis, we show that AoA and frequency are related in different ways to the phonological form and imageability of different words. In the second study, three groups of participants (34 seven-year-olds, 30 ten-year-olds, and 17 adults) took part in an auditory lexical decision task, with stimuli varying in AoA, frequency, length, neighbourhood density, and imageability. The principal result is that the influence of these different variables changes as a function of AoA: Neighbourhood density effects are apparent for early and late AoA words, but not for intermediate AoA, whereas imageability effects are apparent for intermediate AoA words but not for early or late AoA. These results are discussed from the perspective that AoA affects a word's representation, but frequency affects processing biases.     

Ethnic identity and risky health behaviors in school-age Mexican-American children

The study examined the relationship between ethnic identity and risky health behaviors in 1,892 Mexican-American students (M age= 14.6, SD= 1.35; 50.3% male) in South Texas. The Ethnic Identity Scale assessed ethnic identity and questions from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey measured risky health behaviors (mixed use of alcohol and drugs, heavy drinking, driving under the influence, regular marijuana use, regular cigarette smoking, lack of regular exercise, not eating breakfast regularly, and carrying a gun or knife to school). Logistic regression tested the relationships between ethnic identity and report of risky health behaviors controlling for potential confounders (sex, free school lunch status, grade, and self-reported school grade). Adjusted odds ratio (AOR) and confidence intervals were calculated. Results indicated that being associated with Mexican-American cultural identity was significantly associated with a decreased mixed use of alcohol and drugs (AOR= .97), heavy drinking (AOR= .98), and regular marijuana use (AOR= .97). A stronger ethnic identity was protective against engaging in risky health behaviors among these Mexican-American adolescents.     

Retrieval-induced facilitation: initially nontested material can benefit from prior testing of related material

Classroom exams can assess students' knowledge of only a subset of the material taught in a course. What are the implications of this approach for long-term retention? Three experiments (N = 210) examined how taking an initial test affects later memory for prose materials not initially tested. Experiment 1 shows that testing enhanced recall 24 hr later for the initially nontested material. This facilitation was not seen for participants given additional study opportunities without initial testing. Experiment 2 extends this facilitative effect to a within-subjects design. Experiment 3 demonstrates that this facilitation can be modulated by conscious strategies. These results have implications for educational practice and the theoretical developments of the testing effect, associative memory, and retrieval inhibition.     

The classification of violence risk

The Classification of Violence Risk (COVR) is an interactive software program designed to estimate the risk that a person hospitalized for mental disorder will be violent to others. The software leads the evaluator through a chart review and a brief interview with the patient. At the end of this interview, the software generates a report that contains a statistically valid estimate of the patient's violence risk-ranging from a 1% to a 76% likelihood of violence-including the confidence interval for that estimate, and a list of the risk factors that the program took into account to produce the estimate. In this article, the development of the COVR software is described and several issues that arise in its administration are discussed.     

Does expanded retrieval produce benefits over equal-interval spacing? Explorations of spacing effects in healthy aging and early stage Alzheimer's disease

Three experiments explored different schedules of retrieval practice in young adults, older adults, and individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer type. In each experiment, an initial acquisition phase was presented in which participants studied or attempted to retrieve response words to cues, followed by a later cued-recall test. Experiment 1 produced a benefit of expanded retrieval over equal-interval retrieval during acquisition, but this benefit was lost in final cued recall. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants received corrective feedback during acquisition and modified spacing schedules. There was again no evidence of a difference between expanded and equal-interval conditions in final cued recall. Discussion focuses on the potential benefits and costs of expanded retrieval on a theoretical and applied level.