Proper assessment—conducted with psychometrically strong, easy-to-use instruments designed to help you make critical decisions faster—enables you to develop effective treatment plans for your patients. It can also help mitigate the mental health impact of the pandemic, which has exacerbated symptoms in many areas, including anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
PAR has developed a new resource that can help you filter through your assessment options and quickly choose the right products for your needs—tools that will help you make better, quicker decisions about what’s best for your patients’ mental health and wellbeing.
Related article: Check out PAR’s Spanish assessment solutions page
Quickly compare the benefits of recommended products in the areas of depression, anxiety, trauma, suicide, parenting, resilience, and executive function. You’ll see that many of our products are available for digital and/or remote use—so you can easily and safely test your clients when you’re not together in person. Plus, we’ve included listings for supplemental books that can help round out your knowledge in a particular construct area.
Visit our NEW mental health resources page to discover more.
The Social Emotional Assets and Resilience Scales (SEARS) assesses positive social–emotional attributes in children and adolescents. New research published in the June issue of Assessment provides further data to support its clinical use.
The authors studied the factor structure, measurement invariance, internal consistency, and validity of the SEAR-Adolescent (SEARS-A) Report in individuals ages 8 to 20 years. The study focused on 225 childhood cancer survivors and 122 students without a history of significant health problems in the control group. They were all administered the SEARS-A, finding it to have an adequate factor structure and model fit and demonstrated invariance across domains of age, health status, gender, race, and socioeconomic status.
Additionally, the researchers found the SEARS-A to have excellent internal reliability, criterion validity, and current validity when compared with another similar instrument.
The researchers concluded that the SEARS-A has the potential to be a sound tool to assess and predict social–emotional outcomes among at-risk youth between the ages of 8 and 20 years.
Learn more about this research or learn more about the SEARS.
Editor's note: This article refers to a promotion that has expired.
Your students and clients deserve a worry-free testing experience—one that doesn’t cause additional concern about cleanliness. But when you’re administering tests that require the use of stimuli, the last thing you want to do is spend an extra hour of your day wiping down hundreds of stimulus pages.
Our new In-Person e-Stimulus Books are the answer. Administered via tablet, they…
In addition, e-Manuals can help you build a digital library of testing resources, accessible from anywhere. e-Manuals are downloadable digital versions of PAR professional manuals, and we offer more than 100 of them for your convenience. (We’re adding more all the time!) Downloading e-Manuals is super easy, but we’ve created a handy video that provides all the information you need to install and use them.
Related article: Advice on teleassessment
Plus, for a limited time, we’re allowing you to go digital for free! Access the the In-Person e-Stimulus Book version of any print stimulus book you own and the e-Manual version of any print manual you own—at no charge! The print version must have been purchased prior to publication of the digital version. Just contact Customer Support at 1.800.331.8378 or via email at cs@parinc.com to request. This offer expires on May 28, so don’t delay!
Visit our e-stimulus page for the latest updates and information on In-Person e-Stimulus Books. For more information on e-Manuals, check out our list of available e-Manuals.
The Hopkins Verbal Learning Test–Revised™ (HVLT-R™) and the Brief Visuospatial Memory Test–Revised™ (BVMT-R™) are now available for scoring on PARiConnect. The HVLT-R assesses verbal learning and memory, while the BVMT-R measures visuospatial memory. Both tests are neuropsychological assessments that can be used together as part of a battery.
HVLT-R and BVMT-R Score Reports generated by PARiConnect provide:
A score summary table that provides raw scores, T scores, and percentiles
A raw score profile
A T-score profile
Save valuable clinical time by letting PARiConnect handle the scoring. Now you can easily score these assessments online and without the expense of software or licenses. Learn more about the HVLT-R and the BVMT-R now!
Don’t have a PARiConnect account? It’s easy to sign up! Learn more
Interested in research conducted using the HVLT-R and BVMT-R? Click here and here to see our lists of research articles.
Related article: New on PARiConnect: Digital Library
Are you doing research with a PAR product and think it could help others? We are looking to gather additional data on our existing tests with the goal of further validating our instruments, identifying and developing product enhancements, or adding features that allow our Customers to better meet the needs of those they serve.
We are inviting clinicians, researchers, and other professionals to partner with us to advance the scope of solutions we can provide, especially focusing on better helping underserved populations.
Could your data help others? We would love to talk to you about it!
Click here
PARiConnect is the industry’s best online assessment platform. And now it has gotten even better with the introduction of the Digital Library.
What is the Digital Library?
It’s an online location within PARiConnect that stores all e-Manuals purchased from PAR in one convenient place.
How do you access the Digital Library?
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.
What are the benefits of the Digital Library?
Additional flexibility! Now you can easily access your materials from most internet-connected devices.
Have digital manuals, but don’t have a PARiConnect account?
Register for free and get 3 free assessments and reports plus easy access to your digital e-Manuals.
More than 640,000 children and adolescents visit the emergency room each year for concerns related to traumatic brain injury (TBI). TBI can have a negative impact on an individual’s learning and memory, affecting educational attainment in school and beyond. New research on TBI provides more insight into its effect on children and adolescents.
Just-published research in the journal Assessment provides evidence of clinical utility of the Child and Adolescent Memory Profile (ChAMP; Sherman & Brooks, 2015) as part of a more comprehensive evaluation of traumatic brain injury in children and adolescents. The ChAMP assesses visual and verbal memory that allows for both in-depth evaluation and memory screening.
Kate Wilson, Sofia Lesica, and Jacobus Donders from the Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan assessed 61 children and adolescents with TBI using the ChAMP within 1 to 12 months after injury. They found that most ChAMP index scores demonstrated significant negative correlations with time to follow commands following TBI. After comparing ChAMP scores to a matched control group, they found that individuals with TBI had statistically significantly lower scores on all indexes, though sensitivity and specificity were suboptimal.
The researchers concluded that the ChAMP has modest utility as part of a comprehensive evaluation of TBI in children and adolescents. Learn more about their research or learn more about the ChAMP.
Serving your clients and students is getting a little easier.
e-Manuals—downloadable digital versions of PAR professional manuals—are becoming more and more useful as having remote access to files is increasingly necessary for you to do your job efficiently.
In our uncertain times, you can’t always rely on paper. e-Manuals allow for greater flexibility in how you access important product information.
In addition to the nearly 100 e-Manuals previously available, 13 new e-Manuals can now be purchased and downloaded for your digital tool kit:
CAS (Children’s Aggression Scale) e-Manual
CAS (College Adjustment Scales) e-Manual
CNNS e-Manual
COVR e-Manual
CPCI e-Manual
CTI e-Manual
PAI-CS Module e-Manual
PAI Public Safety Selection Report e-Manual
PDDBI-SV e-Manual
RADS-2:SF e-Manual
SIQ e-Manual
SOPA e-Manual
TSCC/TSCYC Screening Form Technical Paper e-Manual
And, over the next several months, we’ll release dozens more.
Related article: REMOTE ADMINISTRATION FOR THE IGT2 AND WCST!
The best part? If you’ve already purchased a print professional manual for which we carry an e-Manual equivalent, we’ll provide that e-Manual to you at no charge, for a limited time. Simply call us at 1.800.331.8378 to request your free download.
Keep checking parinc.com as we add more e-Manuals to our lineup, or call our Customer Support team at 1.800.331.8378 for more information.
With a global pandemic, remote learning in many areas, and increased isolation from friends and family, it’s more important than ever to screen students for exposure to trauma and related symptoms this school year.
Symptoms of trauma include:
Trauma is widespread
View our infographic to learn more about how trauma affects children – click here to view.
Trauma can result from any type of adverse childhood experience (ACE) including physical abuse, substance abuse, divorce, witnessing violence, and certainly a global pandemic and ongoing quarantine. More than two thirds of children report at least one traumatic event by the age of 16 years.
Trauma can affect learning
No matter the cause of your students’ trauma, the effects can have a real impact on their academic success. Classroom problems like behavioral issues, difficulty focusing, and disengagement from social activities can prevent them from learning and succeeding in school.
Screen for trauma to help children sooner
The Trauma Symptom Checklist for Children Screening Form (TSCC-SF) and Trauma Symptom Checklist for Young Children Screening Form (TSCYC-SF) now offer online administration and scoring via PARiConnect to help you connect with your students in the classroom—or remotely—and determine if they need help.
In just 5 minutes, the TSCC-SF (for ages 8-17 years) and TSCYC-SF (for ages 3-12 years) indicate whether a child or youth is at risk for clinically significant psychological disturbance so you can determine if follow-up evaluation and treatment are needed. These important tools support the trauma-informed care approach, and convenient scoring on PARiConnect provides the information you need in minutes.
This fall, PAR will add a new neuropsychological assessment instrument to our lineup: the Older Adult Cognitive Screener (OACS), an all-digital informant rating scale that enables you to make quick decisions about your older clients’ (ages 55 to 90 years) mental status. The OACS is designed for early screening of dementia symptoms and will assist with follow-up determinations, including initiating or referring your clients for comprehensive diagnostic testing. Administration and scoring take only 10 minutes.
Working with authors Cecil R. Reynolds, PhD, and Erin D. Bigler, PhD, our goal as we’ve developed the OACS was to provide a rapid, cost-effective, and valid means of screening older adults for cognitive dysfunction based on the observations and knowledge of a reliable caregiver, family member, or friend (e.g., spouse or home health care worker).
Unlike on similar measures, OACS items map directly onto the six principal domains of neurocognitive function identified in the DSM-5®: executive function, complex attention, language, perceptual–motor, social cognition, and learning and memory. Activities of daily living (ADLs) are also assessed.
Related article: TICS: ASSESS FOR COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT REMOTELY
Another significant advantage of the OACS is its digital format, which aligns well with today’s telehealth models and enables you to continue testing even when social distancing is required. Plus, because the OACS is administered through PARiConnect, data are easily exported into an electronic medical record (EMR) system.
The OACS is designed to be used in medical settings by primary care and specialty physicians and can be administered and scored appropriately by nursing staff and properly trained clerical staff. It is also useful for clinical psychologists, neuropsychologists, and others who treat older adults on a clinical basis in a variety of mental health settings, including nursing homes and community mental health centers.
The OACS will be released this fall. For more information, or to preorder, visit parinc.com/OACS.