As children return to school, many may exhibit signs of anxiety and stress. Your job is to find out whether these are existing issues or whether they are related to the pandemic and quarantine.

Help is here.

The Pandemic Anxiety Screener for Students–12 (PASS-12) is a 12-item checklist developed by FAR, FAM, and FAW author Steven G. Feifer, DEd, designed specifically to evaluate the impact of a pandemic on a child’s school-based functioning.

Related article: OUR STORIES: STARTING THE NEW SCHOOL YEAR

A parent rating form, it allows you to rate the severity of anxiety symptoms specific to the pandemic and quarantine and provides information to help school professionals make important decisions.

• Entirely digital, the PASS-12 is administered and scored via PARiConnect, our online testing platform, in about 5 minutes—for the combined price of just $1.
• Raw scores and percentiles are provided for quick and easy interpretation; follow-up with more comprehensive assessment is recommended if the total raw score falls within an elevated range.
• Intervention recommendations and resources are provided in the Score Report, and the free Technical Paper provides administration guidance.

To learn more or order, visit parinc.com/PASS-12. 

Top Psychology Schools in the U.S.

A number of online academic resources have come out with lists of the best U.S. colleges for psychology majors. We decided to take a look at College Crunch, Social Psychology Network, Schoolahh to see which undergraduate programs were highly ranked across the board.

Stanford University in Palo Alto, California ranks number one on all three of the lists above. This isn’t surprising given that Stanford’s psychology department has been collecting kudos for more than fifty years. The philosophy of the department is that success results from the connection between teaching and scientific research. It’s organized into five areas of study within the field of psychology: Cognitive, Developmental, Neuroscience, Personality and Social Psychology. Research at Stanford includes (but is not limited to) topics like aggression, social behavior, competitiveness, dreaming, color perception, spatial relations, learning and memory.

The University of Michigan Ann Arbor appears in the top five of each list. This Big Ten School offers three concentrations: 1) Psychology, 2) Brain, Behavior and Cognitive Science and 3) Neuroscience. The school has many research labs that provide undergraduates with the ability to participate in research studies. Active research studies include African-American racial identity, human brain electrophysiology, human performance and cognition, visual and verbal working memory, affective neuroscience and biopsychology, neuronal mechanisms of movement and reward, and many more.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign appears in the top ten on the lists above largely because of its laboratories for research in human learning, animal learning, physiological psychology, animal motivation, human perception, and social behavior, just to name a few. The school houses extensive computer facilities, a complete animal colony, a fully equipped video laboratory facility for observation and videotape production. The Urbana-Champaign psychology department also operates a psychological clinic and other research and training facilities housed outside of its main building.

Because PAR, Inc. is based in Florida, we’re also familiar with high caliber programs in our Sunshine State. Most notable is University of Florida’s graduate program, which was voted one of the best programs in the country by U.S. News and World Report in 2009. Programs at University of South Florida and University of Miami also earn high marks for their courses of study and resources.