The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health's School Connectedness Scale (SCS) has been widely used in psychological, public health, and education research, but has undergone limited psychometric analysis. This study used the responses of 500,800 junior and senior high school students who completed the biennial California Healthy Kids…

Research supports the connection between engagement, achievement, and school behavior across levels of economic and social advantage and disadvantage. Despite increasing interest and scientific findings, a number of interrelated conceptual and methodological issues must be addressed to advance this construct, particularly for designing…

This study investigates the role of school connectedness in mediating the relation between students' sense of hope and life satisfaction for three groups: Bullied Victims, Peer Victims, and Nonvictims. Students in grades 5 to 12 (N = 866) completed the California Bully/Victim Scale, School Connectedness Scale, Children's Hope Scale, and Students'…

A growing body of literature on risk and resilience, school engagement, and positive psychology offers school psychologists new perspectives with which to consider students' progress through school. This literature emphasizes the importance of monitoring student internal and external assets. In this article, a framework is reviewed that highlights…

Obesity among children and adolescents is a major public health concern affecting the physical and emotional health of youth while increasing their risk of reduced quality and duration of life. Schools and communities have begun to galvanize to address this epidemic and need quality empirical information to guide their policy, programming, and…

Planning is essential to creating safe schools and it is required by the Federal No Child Left Behind legislation (U.S. Department of Education, 2004) and implemented via district local education action plans. The implementation of these plans involves continuous monitoring and reevaluation of information pertinent to each campus. As such, this…

Examines responses of 40,435 students from the "Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey" and uses student self-reported school risk behaviors to "predict" recent weapon possession at school. Although school risk behaviors were moderately correlated with school weapon possession, many frequent weapon carriers displayed zero school risks. Argues…

Examines child and family risk factors and behavioral indexes of youths with emotional and behavioral disorders to determine critical factors that predicted the restrictiveness of their educational placements. Discusses findings in the context of system of care efforts to reform service system response to youth with special-education and…

The purpose of this special issue is to provide school psychologists with information pertinent to the prevalence, development, diagnosis, and treatment of anger-related problems within school settings. Describes four areas of interest for school psychologists concerning anger and aggression in school. Discusses the articles contained in this…

Reviews efforts to categorize anger-related patterns among youth and proposes an empirically derived typology for males based upon a multidimensional conceptualization of anger in school settings. Uses a two-stage clustering procedure to develop six anger preference styles that described a sample of 200 students in grades 6-12. (MKA)

Examined performance and error patterns of 50 bilingual Mexican-American third through fifth graders on the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT) and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R). The EOWPVT had adequate concurrent validity with PPVT-R. On both tests, scores were almost two standard deviations below normative…

Examined implementation of California's mandate that the simple difference score distribution model be used as part of state Learning Disability eligibility criteria in six California school districts. Results revealed that placement decisions were influenced by students' discrepancy scores, but that prereferral status (initial evaluation versus…

Completed a factor analysis of the abbreviated Conners Teacher Rating Scale (CTRS) for 108 regular and special education students. Two factors accounted for 69.5 percent of the total response variance: Factor I described attention deficits and motor activity, and Factor II described excessive affective reactions. (JAC)

Examined factors that influenced the educational diagnoses of a sample of referred students (N=80) in grades one through six. Results indicated that the recommendations made by the multidisciplinary teams were associated primarily with the level of the Full Scale IQ. (LLL)

To guide the unbiased process of visual inference, a four-step model is presented for the assessment of reliability, intervention effect, meaningfulness, and generalizability. A Visual Inference Checklist (VIC) systematizes this assessment process. (Author)