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 Comorbidity of Conduct Problems and Depression in Childhood and Adolescence

An extensive body of research documents the high prevalence of comorbidity among child and adolescent disorders in general and between conduct problems and depression in particular. These problems co-occur at significantly higher rates than would be expected by chance and their comorbidity may have significant implications for nosology, treatment, and prognosis. Four main hypotheses have been put forth to account for these high rates of comorbidity. First, comorbidity may be a result of shortcomings associated with referral or informant biases. Second, comorbidity may be an artifact of overlapping definitional criteria. Third, one disorder may cause the other disorder by influencing the developmental trajectory and placing an individual at increased risk for further difficulties. Finally, comorbidity between two disorders may be explained by shared underlying causal or risk factors. The purpose of this review is to explore these possibilities, concentrating primarily on the common risk factors of parent psychopathology, emotion regulation, and cognitive biases that may underlie the co-occurrence of these two disorders. Based on our review, we propose a model for the development of comorbidity between these two disorders.     

The Negative Physical Self Scale: Initial development and validation in samples of Chinese adolescents and young adults

This research presents four studies on the initial development and validation of the 48-item Negative Physical Self Scale (NPS), a multidimensional measure of body image concerns for use with Chinese samples. In Study 1 (N = 1095), exploratory factor analyses identified five dimensions underlying the NPS (General Appearance, Facial Appearance, Shortness, Fatness, Thinness). In Study 2 (N = 1057), confirmatory factor analyses replicated this factor structure. In Studies 3 and 4, the validity of all NPS dimensions except Thinness Concern was supported via their patterns of relation with both objective physical characteristics/behaviors and other self-report measures of body image and general self worth. Because Chinese adolescents and young adults expressed relatively more concerns about General Appearance, Shortness, and Facial Appearance than about Fatness, the NPS may have greater utility for assessing body image disturbances in China than existing measures that focus exclusively on general body satisfaction and body size/weight.     

DSM-defined anxiety disorders symptoms in South African youths: Their assessment and relationship with perceived parental rearing behaviors

This study investigated DSM-defined anxiety symptoms in South African youths. Children and adolescents (N = 701) from various cultural groups completed the SCARED and a questionnaire measuring perceived parental rearing behaviors. Results indicated that the psychometric properties of the SCARED were satisfactory in the total sample of South African youths, and acceptable in colored and black children and adolescents. Further, colored and black youths displayed higher SCARED scores than white youths, and there were also differences in the perceived parental rearing behaviors of the cultural groups. White youths generally rated their parents' rearing behaviors as less anxious, overprotective, and rejective, but more emotionally warm than colored and black youths. Finally, positive correlations were found between anxious rearing, overprotection, and rejection and anxiety symptoms. The clinical and research implications of these findings are briefly discussed.     

Specific phonological impairments in dyslexia revealed by eyetracking

Phonological deficits in dyslexia are typically assessed using metalinguistic tasks vulnerable to extraneous factors such as attention and memory. The present work takes the novel approach of measuring phonology using eyetracking. Eye movements of dyslexic children were monitored during an auditory word recognition task in which target items in a display (e.g., candle) were accompanied by distractors sharing a cohort (candy) or rhyme (sandal). Like controls, dyslexics showed slower recognition times when a cohort distractor was present than in a baseline condition with only phonologically unrelated distractors. However, unlike controls, dyslexic children did not show slowed recognition of targets with a rhyme distractor, suggesting they had not encoded rhyme relationships. This was further explored in an overt phonological awareness test of cohort and rhyme. Surprisingly, dyslexics showed normal rhyme performance but poorer judgment of initial sounds on these overt tests. The results implicate impaired knowledge of rhyme information in dyslexia; however they also indicate that testing methodology plays a critical role in how such problems are identified.     

The effects of undergarment type on the urinary continence of toddlers

There is a growing trend toward later toilet training of typically developing children. This trend is a problem for caregivers and professionals who work with young children, because it is associated with a number of costs and health risks in child-care settings. Results of a recent study (Tarbox, Williams, & Friman, 2004) suggest that wearing underwear may facilitate the development of toileting skills. Based on these findings, we examined the effects of wearing disposable diapers, disposable pull-on training pants, and underwear on urinary continence of 5 typically developing toddlers in a child-care setting. Underwear decreased incontinence and increased continent urinations for 2 of the 5 participants, produced no improvement in 2 participants, and when combined with increased fluid intake and longer sitting periods, produced some favorable trends for the 5th participant.     

Early child grammars: qualitative and quantitative analysis of morphosyntactic production

This article reports on a series of 5 analyses of spontaneous production of verbal inflection (tense and person–number agreement) by 2-year-olds acquiring French as a native language. A formal analysis of the qualitative and quantitative results is developed using the unique resources of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky, 2004). It is argued that acquisition of morphosyntax proceeds via overlapping grammars (rather than through abrupt changes), which OT formalizes in terms of partial rather than total constraint rankings. Initially, economy of structure constraints take priority over faithfulness constraints that demand faithful expression of a speaker's intent, resulting in child production of tense that is comparable in level to that of child-directed speech. Using the independent Predominant Length of Utterance measure of syntactic development proposed in Vainikka, Legendre, and Todorova (1999), production of agreement is shown first to lag behind tense then to compete with tense at an intermediate stage of development. As the child's development progresses, faithfulness constraints become more dominant, and the overall production of tense and agreement becomes adult-like.     

Conditions under which children experience inhibitory difficulty with a "button-press" go/no-go task

Go/no-go tasks seem to provide a simple marker of inhibitory development in young children. Children are told to respond to one stimulus on go trials but to make no response to another stimulus on no-go trials; responding on no-go trials is assumed to reflect a failure to inhibit the go response. However, there is evidence to suggest that a type of go/no-go task, which we call the "button-press" task, does not require inhibition. We investigated the conditions under which young children (M=3 years 6 months, N=120) experience inhibitory difficulty with this type of task. The data suggest that the speed of stimulus presentation is crucial and that other studies using this type of task have presented the stimuli too briefly. The importance of establishing the inhibitory credentials of a task before it is used as a marker of inhibitory control is emphasized.     

Categorization by schema relations and perceptual similarity in 5-year-olds and adults: A study in vision and in audition

This research explores the way in which young children (5 years of age) and adults use perceptual and conceptual cues for categorizing objects processed by vision or by audition. Three experiments were carried out using forced-choice categorization tasks that allowed responses based on taxonomic relations (e.g., vehicles) or on schema category relations (e.g., vehicles that can be seen on the road). In Experiment 1 (visual modality), prominent responses based on conceptually close objects (e.g., objects included in a schema category) were observed. These responses were also favored when within-category objects were perceptually similar. In Experiment 2 (auditory modality), schema category responses depended on age and were influenced by both within- and between-category perceptual similarity relations. Experiment 3 examined whether these results could be explained in terms of sensory modality specializations or rather in terms of information processing constraints (sequential vs. simultaneous processing).