Related Posts

• Tips for successful teleassessment with children

  

  This week’s blog was contributed by Carrie Champ Morera, PsyD, NCSP, LP. Carrie is a licensed school psychologist and the lead project and content director at PAR.  During in-person assessment sessions, you're in control of setting up the physical environment to make it conducive to success. When you work with children and adolescents via telehealth, specifically for teleassessment, you provide not only clinical services but also  guidance to prepare younger clients for their remote sessions. Failure to do so can interrupt telehealth treatment or teleassessment, decrease remote participation and engagement, and jeopardize the ideal conditions needed to establish rapport and build a therapeutic alliance.   Here are 10 tips to consider as you design and maintain a working teleassessment environment with children and adolescents.  Before your first remote session with your student, let them know what to expect. Replicate what you would do during an in-person session.  Before beginning teleassessment, ensure your client has all the materials they need. We developed a checklist to help you get started, available here.  Provide the client with a moment to adjust after entering the assessment space. Take your ...

• What are the types of data collection?

  

  When staff members at PAR are developing a new test, several rounds of data are collected in order to be sure that the test is measuring what it has intended to measure and that it represents the appropriate populations accurately. Data collection occurs all across the U.S. to help us gather that information. Multiple stages of data collection are crucial to test development. Learn more about the different stages of data collection and what is entailed in each step.  Pilot  The pilot stage of data collection is when preliminary data is gathered on a proposed measure with a small sample. The goal of pilot data collection is often to make decisions about item selection, and to determine any aspects of the test that may need alteration prior to standardization. Data collectors provide valuable feedback to PAR staff during this stage regarding the administration of the test and ways it can be improved.  Standardization  Standardization involves gathering data using the proposed measure with a larger, representative sample to create norms used by clinicians to score and interpret results upon the test’s publication. PAR uses ...

• Focus on: Data collection

  

  Ever wonder how PAR gets the information needed to standardize our tests? We rely on data collectors all across the U.S. to help us gather that information. Data collectors are crucial to test development because they help us find the clinical, standardization, and reliability samples needed to create our assessment products. If you have an interest in contributing to the field in a meaningful way, you might be just the person to help us create our next instrument!  Who can be a data collector?  Most of our data collectors are clinical psychologists, school psychologists, psychometrists, speech and language pathologists, and other clinicians. PAR follows the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Guidelines for Psychological Assessment and Evaluation, a system of qualification levels that guides decision-making about who can purchase, administer, and interpret tests (APA, 2020). Anyone administering assessments must be well trained in standardized administration protocols, ethics, and demonstrate competency in practice. For data collection, requirements differ by test. Most projects require a PAR qualification level of B or C.  What is involved in data collection?  Data collectors are responsible for finding participants and are ...

• PARtnering with PAR for your research needs

  

  This week’s blog was contributed by Melissa Milanak, PhD, PAR’s clinical assessment. Melissa is a licensed clinical psychologist and internationally recognized academic. She has extensive clinical experience providing therapy and conducting assessments with a diverse array of patient populations. As your trusted source for assessments for all your clinical needs, PAR is excited to also partner with you in many practical ways as you conduct your research, whether it be a large federally funded grant, a manuscript you are preparing to submit, or a course project with your students and trainees running on zero budget. Here are just a few of the ways PAR can help researchers. Save time with manuscript writing The submission deadline is approaching, and it is time to write the methods section. Instead of spending hours pouring through assessment manuals and reading journal article after journal article to extract psychometric data for the one paragraph, consider reaching out to PAR directly. Our psychologists and researchers have already prepared and formatted the assessment info paragraphs for you that you can insert into your manuscripts and grant applications. Don’t see ...

• ADHD & Academic Concerns During a Pandemic

  

  This week’s blog was contributed by Jeremy Sharp, PhD, licensed psychologist and clinical director at the Colorado Center for Assessment & Counseling and the host of the Testing Psychologist Podcast. Dr. Sharp earned his undergraduate degree in experimental psychology from the University of South Carolina and earned his master’s degree and doctorate in counseling psychology from Colorado State University. He specializes in psychological and neuropsychological evaluation of children and adolescents and provides private practice consulting for psychologists and other mental health professionals who want to start or grow psychological testing services in their practices. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with his wife (also a therapist) and two kids.  The past 18 months have been a rollercoaster for all of us. It seems like a lifetime ago when we got the news that my then-seven and eight-year-old children would NOT be going back to school after spring break in March 2020. I remember thinking, “Okay, we can get through this for a couple of months...things will be back to normal in the fall.” But no! Things were definitely NOT back to normal in the fall for us ...

• Partnering with PAR has never been easier!

  

  Calling all test developers, researchers, data collectors, and potential authors—we want to work with you! We recently revamped our Partner with PAR programs and are proud to announce two new opportunities, in addition to our longstanding data collection and assessment publishing programs. Requests for research proposals. We invite proposals from any nonstudent investigator using PAR instruments for research, with priority given to studies validating PAR instruments, using PAR instruments for developing or validating treatments or interventions, or validating PAR instruments for use with underrepresented populations. PAR Data Program. If you have collected data using one or more PAR products, we want to work with you to help develop new solutions and enhancements that will better serve society and improve the mental health of others. Our ultimate goal is to increase fairness and inclusivity in test development by increasing representation of underserved populations. Data collection. We are always collecting normative, reliability, and validity data for products in development and welcome new data collectors. Bonus—data collectors earn cash payments or credit toward PAR products for the essential work they do for us! Publishing. Developing new ...