This week’s blog was contributed by Terri Sisson, EdS, educational assessment advisor–national accounts. Terri spent more than 20 years in public schools as a licensed school psychologist and is a past president of the Virginia Association of School Psychologists.
I know you’ve been there…you are in one of your schools, have finished an assessment, and are on a deadline for writing a report. Just when you are about to score an assessment, you realize the manual is in your home office! What should you do? No problem…PAR has you covered!
If your district or organization has purchased e-Manuals from PAR—or received them during the pandemic—you can now find them in your PARiConnect account. Simply log in to PARiConnect, find the Quick Links section in the lower right corner, and click on Digital Library—there you will find all your e-Manuals. When your district has digital content in its PARiConnect account, everyone who has a log-in will have access. Digital access makes it easy to organize and find the information you need.
Here are some of the convenient features of the e-Manuals you’ll find in PARiConnect’s Digital Library:
Table of contents: Once you click on the e-Manual you wish to read, you can easily use the linked table of contents to quickly jump to the section or page you need.
Bookmarks: Bookmark pages for easy reference by simply clicking the bookmark tab—and quickly find the pages you use most frequently.
Highlight: Use the highlighter to mark important text.
Hyperlinks: The text of the e-Manual contains hyperlinks to relevant tables and appendices—no need to flip through pages.
Search bar: Click on the magnifying glass to search specific words or terms.
If you’re not sure where to find the information you need, the search feature makes finding it simple (and fast). We know COVID-19 has changed the way we work. There is more flexibility, and more people are working from home. It’s imperative to have access to your e-Manuals from wherever you are. Using the PARiConnect Digital Library makes it easy to access all your manuals in one convenient place.
To learn more or access, visit pariconnect.com.
This week’s blog was contributed by Darla DeCarlo, LMHC, PsyS, PAR’s regional manager–educational assessments. Darla is a certified school psychologist who spent more than 30 years providing professional services in a variety of settings.
School personnel have been navigating chaotic times for almost two years, and psychological services departments have had to make some difficult decisions. Positions have been eliminated, staff has changed, and psychologists have had to juggle added tasks within their department (and/or schools) while grappling with existing duties. With all of this added responsibility comes added pressure.
One common concern among school psychologists is finding time to train on assessment tools. Introducing an entire staff to new test options, training new staff and interns on existing instruments,
and familiarizing staff on what’s available can be confusing and time-consuming. Incorporating the free PAR Training Portal as part of regular monthly staff meetings can provide solutions to these problems. In just 30 to 60 minutes, an entire staff can learn more about a PAR tool—from instrument overview and development to scoring and normative data. It’s a perfect way to provide needed training while preserving staff members’ valuable time to take care of district business. Staff who can’t attend can access the presentation online 24/7, ensuring staff members are on the same page when it comes to assessment training. The PAR Training Portal also includes recorded topical and author webinars, and the training courses and presentations are updated frequently.
When psychological services departments are dedicated to improving staff knowledge to keep up with changes in school psychology, it can increase staff efficiency and build confidence. In addition, participating in trainings helps reinforce group goals, shows the staff they are valued, and improves morale. And who doesn’t want that for their staff?
Visit partrainingportal.com to get started.
This week’s blog was contributed by Eric Culqui, MA, PPS, PAR’s educational assessments advisor–regional accounts. Eric is a licensed school psychologist with more than 14 years of experience. He’s a NASP-certified crisis response trainer and first responder.
Across the nation, many schools have opened their doors to welcome students back for face-to-face instruction. After nearly two years of quarantines, remote learning, and potential health scares, many educators are concerned with the overall health of their students. It’s imperative for educational institutions to have a measurement tool to identify emotionally at-risk children as they transition back to the school environment.
The Feifer Assessment of Childhood Trauma (FACT) Teacher Form is a multipurpose rating scale designed to convey how stress and trauma impact children (ages 4–18 years) in a school-based setting. This edition allows for immediate use of the instrument by educators while data collection and normative development of the full instrument, which will include a Parent Form and Self-Report Form, continues through the current school year.
Designed for use by educational diagnosticians, school counselors, school psychologists, school nurses, community mental health providers, school administrators, and pediatricians, the FACT Teacher Form is completed by a classroom teacher or other educator familiar with the student’s typical behavior and day-to-day functioning. It’s designed to quantify the impact of traumatic experiences on school-based functioning to generate specific interventions, not to identify a particular source or subtype of trauma.
The FACT Teacher Form consists of 79 items and is administered and scored on PARiConnect, PAR’s online assessment platform. It takes approximately 10 minutes to complete. Higher scores on the clinical scales indicate increasing symptoms of stress and trauma—information critical for triage and intervention.
Items were written based on the behavioral, emotional, and academic difficulties that arise when students are in a state of physiological and/or psychological dysregulation due to trauma and stress.
Understanding the struggles and trauma of our school-age children is critical to providing them appropriate supports and interventions. The FACT Teacher Form (and upcoming Parent Form and Self-Report Form) provide educators with the tools necessary to identify and assist students most in need.
Learn more about the FACT Teacher Form.
Already the most reliable platform in the industry, PARiConnect continues to grow by adding features that complement your online practice.
One of our newest additions to PARiConnect is the introduction of the interactive bell curve, where you can personalize the interactive bell curve, input multiple scores, quickly assess and visually capture how a client scores in relation to others, and easily explain assessment results to clients/parents. The interactive bell curve can be accessed within the PARiConnect Quick Links section.
Another new feature is the Digital Library. The Digital Library is an online location within PARiConnect that stores all e-Manuals purchased from PAR in one convenient place. Simply log into your PARiConnect account to access all your materials. Once you are logged in, you can find the Digital Library under the Quick Links section. Now you can easily access your materials from most internet-connected devices.
Plus, we’ve added new assessments to the platform, like the Dementia Rating Scale—2™ (DRS-2™), Brief Visuospatial Memory Test—Revised™ (BVMT-R™), the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test—Revised™ (HVLT-R™), the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test® (WCST®), and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test® 64-Card Version (WCST-64™).
Don’t have a PARiConnect account? Register for free and get 3 free assessments and reports.
Want to learn more? Join Daniel McFadden for a free webinar on the Digital Library and the ChecKIT family of products on February 10. Register here! Can’t make this one? We have other PARiConnect tutorials and webinars located on our Training Portal. Sign up or login for free.
This week’s blog was contributed by Carrie Champ Morera, PsyD, lead project and content director, and Theo Miron, PsyS, regional manager–educational assessments.
Why should psychologists and other clinicians assess for emotional disturbance (ED) in the school setting? Parents and caregivers of 8.3 million school-aged children (ages 4 to 17 years) have sought help from school staff or mental health professionals about their child’s emotional or behavioral difficulties. Approximately 7.5% of children ages 6 to 17 years used prescribed medication during the past 6 months for emotional or behavioral difficulties. Assessment of ED is necessary in the school setting to help children obtain the emotional and behavioral support services they need to be successful.
Over the past 20 years, the number of students served within special education has steadily increased, while the number of students being served under ED eligibilities has steadily decreased. For example, during the 2000–2001 school year, 6.29 million students received special education services with 7.6% of those students identified as having an ED. Although the population of students receiving special education services grew by almost one million children to 7.13 million over the next 18 years, only 5% were identified as having an ED during the 2018–2019 school year.
How can we improve ED identification and help children obtain the services they need to be successful in school? It is the school’s responsibility and a school psychologist’s professional role to find children who are struggling emotionally and behaviorally, identify them through the evaluation process, and then connect them with appropriate services and interventions so they can begin to heal and make educational, social, emotional, and behavioral progress.
When completing assessments for ED, we need to carefully consider and adhere to specific eligibility criteria while distinguishing the difference between social maladjustment (SM) and ED. Practitioners also need to consider DSM-V-related diagnoses as well as the impact of trauma, adverse childhood experiences (ACES), and the pandemic on the child’s functioning. It is also imperative to be cognizant of racial disproportionality in determining eligibility for ED services (see NASP Position Statement: Racial and Ethnic Disproportionality in Education).
Assessments of ED need to be comprehensive and include multiple tests and information from a variety of sources. Clinical interviews with the student, caregivers, and teachers, as well as observations of the student in the natural environment are paramount. Trauma, ACES, and the pandemic also need to be considered in the assessment of ED. Childhood adversity is a broad term that refers to a wide range of circumstances or events that pose a serious threat to a child’s physical or psychological wellbeing, including child abuse, neglect, divorce, bullying, poverty, and community violence. Adverse experiences can have profound consequences, particularly when they occur early in life, are chronic, and accumulate over time. Trauma is an outcome of exposure to adversity while adversities are the cause of trauma. Trauma affects everyone differently, depending on individual, family, and environmental risk, as well as protective factors.
Repeated or prolonged trauma in addition to the effects of the pandemic can have a litany of adverse outcomes on our children in the areas of cognition, brain development, behavior, emotions, mental health, physical health, and relationships. These factors need to be considered in a comprehensive evaluation for ED.
Since the start of the pandemic, we have seen a significant increase in kids struggling with both emotional and behavioral difficulties. This increase may lead to an uptick in the number of ED-related assessment referrals that come across our desks and the number of students who require special education services. This leads us into how we assess children for an ED and the benefits of using the Emotional Disturbance Decision Tree (EDDT).
Dr. Bryan Euler, the author of the EDDT, has worked as a school counselor, diagnostician, lead school psychologist, and a clinical psychologist. While working in the Albuquerque public schools, Dr. Euler teamed up with PAR to create the EDDT to provide a standardized approach to the assessment of ED. It was designed to directly address the framework of the federal ED eligibility criteria; for every component of the federal ED criteria, there’s a corresponding EDDT scale or cluster. The scales within the assessment are written to address these broad domains thoroughly, then help school psychologists apply the specific criteria to make informed decisions on both eligibility and programming.
The EDDT includes all the relevant aspects of the federal ED criteria. It contains scales and clusters that address each of the specific ED criteria. The structure of the EDDT walks the practitioner through each area of the federal ED criteria.
Bryan Euler, PhD, describes the benefits of the EDDT and the importance of multiple informants, including the student’s perspective, here.
There are several best practices to keep in mind with the EDDT: Include the viewpoint of multiple raters (teacher, parent, and/or self) from different settings (school, home, and community). Use the EDDT as part of a comprehensive evaluation to determine ED eligibility. In addition to the EDDT, be sure to include qualitative information such as interviews (from the student, parents, and/or teachers) and observations across school settings to supplement the data received on the EDDT.
Carrie Champ Morera, PsyD and Theo Miron, PsyS will present on the EDDT at the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) annual convention in February. In their presentation, Assessing Emotional Disturbance in Schools Using the Emotional Disturbance Decision Tree (EDDT), they will explore the features and trends in ED and investigate the structure and use of the EDDT. If you attend NASP, feel free to stop by the PAR booth to learn more about how PAR can meet your assessment needs.
PAR is excited to announce the release In-Person e-Stimulus Books for the Neuropsychological Assessment Battery® (NAB®) modules!
The NAB Attention Module, NAB Executive Functions Module, NAB Memory Module, NAB Spatial Module, NAB Language Module, and NAB Screening Module In-Person e-Stimulus Books are convenient and more hygienic alternatives to paper stimulus books and cards. They are designed to be used via tablet during face-to-face administration. Be sure to download our new white paper prior to administering for guidance on how to use e-Stimulus Books.
Did you purchase a NAB kit or paper stimulus book prior to November 3, 2021? We’re pleased to offer the In-Person e-Stimulus Book (for in-person administration via tablet) to you at no charge for a limited time! Just call 1.800.331.8378 or email us at CS@parinc.com with your request.
PAR offers many more In-Person e-Stimulus Books to provide you with the flexibility and confidence you need when administering tests. Check out our e-Stimulus Books web page to learn more.
An Interpretive Report for the Dementia Rating Scale–2™ (DRS-2™) is now available on PARiConnect. The DRS-2 measures mental status in adults with cognitive impairment and assesses an individual’s overall level of cognitive functioning.
The DRS-2 Interpretive Report provides:
Save money and valuable clinical time by letting PARiConnect handle scoring and interpretation of your DRS-2 administrations without the investment of purchasing the entire software program.
Don’t have a PARiConnect account? It’s easy to sign up—plus you get three free administrations and three free reports! Learn more.
No one offers more neuropsychological assessment tools than PAR. We offer more than 100 products for neuropsychologists to assess across the life span—all in one place. Whether you are looking for a comprehensive battery or a specialized test, there’s no need to look further. If you are assessing executive function or memory, ADHD or dementia, aphasia or abstract reasoning—we have the right tool for your needs. We’ve even broken out our list to make it easier to sort by age group or online assessment:
Assess children and adolescents. Whether for attention, executive functioning, or memory, ADHD or learning disabilities, when it comes to neuropsychological testing, let PAR be your trusted resource.
Assess adults. Our comprehensive list of products ranges from cognitive impairment to memory functioning and more, meaning we have the assessments you need to help those you serve. Let us provide the tools to help you provide your clients with the answers they need.
Assess older adults. We carry more neuropsychological tests than anyone else—so when you are assessing for concerns from aphasia to dementia and beyond, we have a solution that will help those you serve.
Assess via PARiConnect. We are constantly expanding our online and remote offerings to give you even more options. Learn more about PARiConnect and how it can help you adapt to flexible administration and scoring options.
Explore our library to build the neuropsychological test battery that suits your specific testing needs.
This week, Sierra Iwanicki, PhD, clinical psychologist and project director at PAR, explains the background to a question PAR often receives—when and why does a test need to be updated or revised?
PAR frequently receives questions about the need to update or revise the instruments we publish. We often look for guidance from published literature and professional organizations such as the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) and the American Psychological Association (APA) to help guide our decisions. Although there are no absolute rules regarding when to update or revise, these professional guidelines and ethical codes provide examples of situations that would prompt the need for test revision. Here is some of the guidance we follow when determining when and if a revision is necessary:
The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing states that “revisions or amendments are necessary when new research data, significant changes in the domain, or new conditions of test use and interpretation suggest that the test is no longer optimal or fully appropriate for some of its intended uses” (pp. 83). The Standards also notes that the decision to revise or update psychological tests may be considered when there is a change in the conceptualization of the construct.
Guideline 2.4 of the International Test Commission’s Guidelines for Practitioner Use of Test Revisions, Obsolete Tests, and Test Disposal requires test publishers to justify the need for a revised test, stating that:
Test revisions may be driven by knowledge that the assessed behaviors are subject to substantial change over time, by significant demographic changes, from research that leads to improvements in theories and concepts that should impact test use, from changes in diagnostic criteria, or in response to test consumers demands for improved versions. (p. 9)
Standard 9.08, Obsolete Tests and Outdated Test Results, of the APA Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, states that “psychologists do not base such decisions or recommendations on tests and measures that are obsolete and not useful for the current purpose.” However, no guidance is provided on how to determine when a test is obsolete.
When determining if revision is necessary, it is important to consider the type of test. For example, the Flynn Effect shows that IQ scores don’t remain consistent over time, meaning intellectual assessment tools need to be updated more frequently than personality assessments, where the content remains more constant over time. Butcher notes that “not everything in life becomes functionally ineffective at the same rate” (p. 263), and tests do not become obsolete simply because of the passage of time.
Ultimately, test publishers are entrusted to monitor changes over time that may prompt the need to revise an assessment.
Are you using a PAR product for research? Learn more about how you can get involved with PAR’s data program.
This week, Sierra Iwanicki, PhD, project director, spoke to Mark A. Blais, PsyD, and Samuel Justin Sinclair, PhD, the coauthors of the SPECTRA: Indices of Psychopathology to gain more insight into the development and uses of this instrument.
What motivated you to create the SPECTRA?
Mark A. Blais, PsyD: Several factors combined to motivate the SPECTRA’s development. Like most psychologists, we were concerned about the shortcomings of the DSM’s categorical diagnostic system (e.g., excessive comorbidity, arbitrary thresholds, and within-disorder heterogeneity) and the problems this system created for psychological assessment. Therefore, we were excited by the emergence of multivariate research exploring the structure of adult psychopathology. And as this research accumulated, we became convinced that an instrument based on a hierarchical–dimensional model of psychopathology would have great utility for clinical assessment. Unfortunately, to our knowledge, none of the existing psychological inventories were fully congruent with the hierarchical model. Confident that the hierarchical model of psychopathology had significant clinical utility, we decided to develop the SPECTRA. With funding from the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry, we undertook a rigorous development process that resulted to the SPECTRA’s publication in the spring of 2018.
How does the SPECTRA differ from other broadband psychological inventories?
Blais: The SPECTRA differs from other broadband inventories conceptually and interpretatively. Based on contemporary hierarchical models, the SPECTRA was designed to assess psychopathology at three clinically meaningful levels or bandwidths. The 12 clinical scales provide a narrow-band assessment of constructs similar to DSM disorders. The three higher-order scales reorganize symptoms into the broader dimensions of Internalizing, Externalizing, and Reality-Impairing psychopathology. At the broadest level, the SPECTRA’s Global Psychopathology Index (GPI) yields a single overarching measure of psychiatric burden and vulnerability. Interpretively, the SPECTRA’s three levels of assessment provide unique information about a patient’s clinical presentation, course of illness, and prognosis. We suggest employing an interpretive strategy that moves from the global, GPI, through to the three broad dimensions, and down to the specific clinical scales. This approach allows the examiner to write a concise description of severity and prognosis (GPI), complexity and treatment focus (dimensional scales), and current symptom expression (clinical scales).
What kinds of settings/contexts might the SPECTRA have utility for mental health providers?
Samuel Justin Sinclair, PhD: As our understanding of psychopathology and diagnosis have advanced with the emergence of the hierarchical–dimensional model, we believe an instrument like the SPECTRA has broad clinical utility. Clinically speaking, the SPECTRA organizes psychopathology in a unique way that informs a more differentiated understanding of etiology, complexity, and burden. As such, we see utility in comprehensive outpatient clinical assessments (like the ones we conduct in our own practice), where the referral questions and clinical presentations are usually complex. In this context, the SPECTRA offers important information about current symptom expression (e.g., what specifically the patient is experiencing), as well as valuable information about complexity (e.g., elevations in multiple spectra domains) and general burden (i.e., the p factor). Such information is valuable for treatment planning, both in terms of specific targets to focus on (e.g., PTSD symptoms) and also breadth and intensity of services that may be indicated. We also believe the SPECTRA has utility for inpatient or acute treatment contexts, where a more focal psychological assessment may be useful. Given the SPECTRA’s lower patient burden (i.e., it is roughly 75% shorter than most other broadband instruments), it may be ideal in these specific types of acute care settings. In fact, we recently published a study assessing the validity and utility of the SPECTRA in an inpatient setting, and the results suggested it performed quite well. Similarly, we have also recently explored the validity of the SPECTRA in a sample of incarcerated individuals with serious mental illness and found good evidence for validity when compared with the specific type and number of SCID-5 diagnoses. Finally, given the SPECTRA’s ability to assess psychopathology and functioning at different levels, we believe the instrument has considerable utility in treatment/outcomes monitoring. As a psychometrically sound, low-burden assessment conceptually aligned with contemporary models of psychopathology and research, we believe there are a wide array of different application possibilities with an instrument like the SPECTRA.
What is the p factor and how is it relevant to clinical assessment?
Blais: The p factor represents one of the most exciting and valuable insights revealed by contemporary psychopathology research. Similar to Spearman’s general factor of cognitive ability (e.g., g factor), the p factor is an overarching general factor of psychopathology. As the g factor reflects overall cognitive ability, the p factor seems to represent, from low to high, overall psychiatric burden. Therefore, it has the potential to be a reliable single index of a patient’s overall psychiatric burden and impairment. The p factor emerges statistically from the positive correlations observed among measures of psychopathology. The statistical p factor is robust and widely replicated. Our conceptual understanding of the p factor is still evolving, but research shows that subjects high on p factor suffer more functional impairment, have greater comorbidity, evidence neurocognitive dysfunction, and are more likely to experience a suboptimal or atypical response to treatment. The SPECTRA, with GPI, is the only broadband inventory specifically designed to generate a validated p-factor measure.
How does the SPECTRA assess psychopathology in a way that is useful for clinicians?
Sinclair: As noted above, the SPECTRA provides unique clinical information at the different levels of the psychopathology hierarchy. At the lowest level, clinicians are able to see where and to what degree patients are expressing primary psychopathology—at the level of the DSM-5 syndromes. However, at the spectra level, clinicians are better able to see how a person’s psychopathology may cluster—and whether this tends to reflect more within-domain (or spectra) symptomatology, or across domains. This information may inform clinical decision making in different ways. For example, to the extent that a person is highly distressed, anxious, and depressed—with multiple elevations across these scales, but all within the Internalizing domain—specific classes of pharmacologic and/or types of psychotherapeutic interventions may be indicated. However, in cases where psychopathology is expressed across multiple spectra (with higher p-factor scores), it may signal greater levels of diagnostic complexity, burden, and impairment in functioning—which would suggest that treatment may need to be multimodal, sequenced, and of longer duration and/or intensity. In contrast to other broadband instruments that assess clinical constructs (e.g., depression, mania) as specific or independent entities, the SPECTRA’s hierarchical–dimensional assessment of psychopathology makes it unique—offering valuable information across different levels of psychopathology.
What are some important things clinicians should know about the SPECTRA?
Sinclair: We believe the conceptual model described earlier is probably what makes the tool most unique and best aligned with contemporary models of psychopathology. However, the instrument is also quite brief—and at just 96 items, it may be something to consider when testing conditions or context do not allow for longer instruments. Likewise, in addition to the core clinical scales and hierarchical dimensions that are assessed, the SPECTRA also contains several supplemental scales assessing suicidal ideation, cognitive concerns, and adaptive psychosocial functioning. The cognitive concerns scale was designed to be disorder agnostic and is meant to assess the types of general cognitive problems (e.g., organization/attention, memory, language) people may experience respective of etiology. This scale helps assess level of functioning, as perceived cognitive difficulties negatively impact motivation, persistence, and confidence. It also functions as a brief screener that can inform decisions about pursuing more formal neuropsychological assessment. In addition, the SPECTRA’s adaptive psychosocial functioning scale was also developed to assess environmental resources (financial and housing), coping strengths, and social support—all of which may be useful for informing treatment recommendations and estimating prognosis. The psychosocial functioning scale was developed from a more positive psychology perspective. We wanted the SPECTRA to focus not only on deficits, but also on strengths and resources. The SPECTRA’s supplemental scales provide clinically valuable information above and beyond psychopathology—information that allows us better insight into a person’s functioning and where and how we might be able to help as psychologists.
Learn more about the SPECTRA.