School Psychologist Praxis (5402)

3 Purposes of Goal Development

1.) Direct teaching and intervention

2.) Focus plan on student outcomes

3.) Structure methods for assessment and evaluation

Goal Statements

Should be written in a clear and measurable way that explains what the student's performance will look like if the intervention is effective

4 Components of Goal Statements

Time frame, condition, behavior, criteria

Plan Development

Serves as a guide for the intervention implementation for school psychologists and other parties involved. Plans must be written clearly enough for anyone to implement. Must include how each step will be completed, materials needed, and responsibilities of persons involved.

Measurement Strategy

Should remain the same as when baseline data was collected. Allows for accurate comparisons between baseline performance and progress-monitoring data.

6 Components to Data Collection for Measurement Strategy

Method, materials needed, setting, person(s), time frame, and frequency

Treatment Integrity Definition

The degree to which the intervention is implemented as planned.

Treatment Integrity Assessments

Self-report, permanent products, and/or direct observation

4 Components of Determining Intervention Effectiveness

Frequency of data collection, strategies to summarize data for evaluation, when data is analyzed, and decision rule

Variables to Monitor and Address for Skills of Teachers

Student interruptions, teacher interruptions, visitors to the class, transitions/wait time

Academic Learning Time Definition

Portion of time allocated to a content area during which students are actively and productively engaged in learning. Assess ALT-> Teacher self-analysis

School Conditions in Academic Progress

Safe schools promote optimal academic achievement for all.

Teach school staff crisis management and intervention techniques.

Foster caring and supportive relationships between students and staff.

Crowd control, improve lighting, enforce dress codes.

Post signs that communicate zero tolerance for prohibited behaviors.

Personalize schools to motivate students.

Family Involvement in Academic Progress

Family involvement in student educational experience is negatively related to student age.

Shared responsibility between schools and home.

Influences on Home-School Collaboration

Family characteristics, child characteristics, school personnel characteristics, neighborhood characteristics, and time constraints

BICS

Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills: Skills first acquired when learning a new language

CALP

Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency: Ability to manipulate language in decontextualized academic situations.

Classroom Design

Design room to stimulate learning and to accomplish instructional goals and objectives. Keep high-traffic areas free of congestion. Make commonly used materials easily accessible. Ensure all students can see and hear presentation and displays. Provide study carrels for students who may need extra help.

Classroom Expectations

Expectations set the stage for leaning and behavioral control. Expectations should: be limited in number (3-5), be observable and measurable, be stated explicitly in positive terms, be taught using standard instructional practices, extend school-wide expectations to the classroom.

Classroom Routines

Routines are specific procedures used to the day-to-day running of the class. They must be taught using standard educational practices. Routines should be implemented during non-instructional times as well. Goal is for students to follow the routines independently.

Positive Classroom Consequences

Provide immediate feedback that behavior is acceptable or desired. Increase likelihood that the behavior will be repeated.

Negative Classroom Consequences

Provide immediate feedback that a behavior is unacceptable. Increase the likelihood that the behavior will not be repeated.

Social Skills Programs

Focus on students with difficulties in peer relationships, antisocial, and/or aggressive behaviors

4 Features of Social Skills Programs

Facilitate the initiation and maintenance of positive relationships, promote peer acceptance and friendship development, increase positive school outcomes, help students adapt and adjust to their social environments.

Components of Effective Social Skills Development

Modeling skills, practicing skills within a group setting, providing corrective feedback and reinforcement in the moment, generalization of skills, discuss and review skills often.

Conflict Resolution Programs

Skills may not be acquired incidentally. Unresolved conflict outcomes include: poor academic performance, low self-esteem, and social-behavioral problems. School based programs include: conflict resolution teaching curricula, anger management skills, and peer mediation.

Study Skills Programs

Best practice is for skills to be taught by general education within the current curriculum for skills to transfer. Home-school collaboration is crucial for generalization. SP should develop a plan focusing on: organization, comprehending directions, note-taking, previewing, reading comprehension, test preparation, test taking, self-management, and motivation and affect.

Self-Control Training Programs

Strategies for managing and controlling behavior and implementation of these skills. Types of training include: relaxation, coping self-statements, and anger management. Class-wide interventions may be GBG, Second Step, and Fast Track.

School Problems Associated with Severe Learning Issues

Falling below grade level, dropping out in later grades, decreased motivation and engagement, negative attitudes toward school

Skill-by-treatment Interaction Interventions for Severe Learning Issues

Explicit instruction, appropriate instructional level, frequent opportunities to respond, targeted intervention based on student skill, feedback

School Problems Associated with Anxiety

Academic difficulties with attention, concentration, memory, and problem solving. Difficulties in social situations, often becoming the victims of bulling and harassment.

School-based Interventions for Anxiety

Develop consistent and predictable routines, provide opportunities for practice and rehearsal, use positive approaches, pair with a peer to help socialization skills, teach self-relaxation and self-talk strategies.

School Problems Associated with Depression

Academic difficulties with task selection and completion, problem-solving skills, reasoning, memory and attention, risk of dropping out. Difficulties in social situations, having quality interpersonal relationships, and a negative attributional style.

School-based Interventions for Depression

Improve social skills, avoid negative language, develop a success-oriented approach using a strengths-based strategy, emphasize positive effort and production

School Problems Associated with Attention Issues

Defiance toward authority figures, poor peer relationships, antisocial behaviors, low academic engagement, inconsistent work productivity

Interventions for Attention Problems

School-wide positive behavior support, systematic academic strategy instruction, assessment-based behavioral strategies, self-monitoring

Ethics of Counseling

Obtain parental consent if student is receiving mental health services.

Students should be informed of exceptions to confidentiality from the onset of services.

A school psychologist is obligated to share confidential information when a student requests it, when a student may hurt self or others, or when asked to testify in court.

Forms of Individual Counseling

CBT: increase the child's ability to think before acting

Play therapy: developmentally appropriate way to provide counseling to students at the elementary school level

Bibliotherapy: children can obtain problem solving skills and related to characters who are having the same struggles

Reality therapy: based on forming connections between behaviors and consequences

Group Counseling Techniques

Positive way of addressing students' academic, career, and person/social/emotion/developmental issues.

Provides and atmosphere to develop and establish social skills.

Can address: behavior adjustment, self esteem, coping skills, children of alcoholics, children of divorce.

Multicultural Awareness in Counsleling

Important to develop multicultural competence when working with ethnically and culturally diverse populations. Involves understanding family systems, cultural values, and nonverbal communication.

Principles and Methods of ABA

Motivation, reinforcement, discrete trial instruction, functional assessment, verbal behavior, positive behavior support, task analysis and chaining, shaping, prompting, modeling, picture exchange communication system, incidental teaching activity schedules, generalization and maintenance.

Discrete Trial Instruction

A systematic way of teaching involving a series of repeated trials to teach and maintain cognitive, behavioral, or social skills until the skill is mastered.

Verbal Behavior

A framework for thinking about the development of language and its application. Involves echoic (mimicking), mand (request or demand), tact (label or identify), intraverbal (reciprocal conversation)

Task Analysis

Involves breaking down a skill into smaller steps that are easy to teach; uses forward and backward chaining procedures

Prompts

Used to guide learners to make correct response when teaching tasks; in the beginning, prompts are more obvious and then gradually fade away. Types of prompts: physical, gestural, modeling, and visual.

PECS

Picture exchange communication system. A communication system in which pictures are used by an individual to express what they may needs; used with leaners who have difficulty with social communication; allows students to make requests, comments, or answers

Functional Assessment

A system wherein a behavior analyst collects/records data in oder to determine the function of a behavior and what is reinforcing/maintaining that behavior

Aptitude Treatment Interaction (ATI)

Individual differences in abilities need to be taken into account when interventions or treatments are being planned. There are child characteristics that are assumed to be relevant to the extent to which a child benefits from one type of intervention over another. Using testing in conjunction with other cognitive educational methods can be a good cognitive assessment of child's developmental level and lend information leading to the construction of appropriate interventions

Behaviorist Model of Intervention

Deals with how the teacher structures the environment and provides reinforcement and punishment. Takes the position that a child learns from practice and reinforcement. Best used with younger students

Cognitive Behavioral Model of Intervention

Deals with how students' cognitive processes dictate behavior. takes the position that a child learns from gaining knowledge or modifying existing knowledge. Best used with older students.

Support/Intervention for ASD

Use direct/small group instruction to teach age-appropriate skills, behaviors that can be used to replace problem behavior, cognitive skills that can apply to everyday life. Useful strategies: present information in small steps, provide reinforcement, develop an extremely structure and consistent environment, PECS, social stories

Support/Intervention for ADHD

Use behavior management interventions linked to FBA data. Develop self-monitoring and self-evaluation strategies. Useful strategies: social skills training, peer mediation, response cost systems, contingency contracts, frequent breaks, planners, study skills and time management training. Consider use of medications.

Support/Intervention for Depression

CBT focuses on challenging automatic thoughts, identifying negative thinking, and restructuring negative thoughts. Useful strategies: provide study skills and time management training, teach coping skills and strategies that will assist in battling depressive episodes, increase social, communication, and problem-solving skills, increase pleasant activities to decrease anxiety, avoid negative approaches. Consider use of antidepressants.

Support/Intervention for ID

Provide early identification/intervention programs. Develop parent training programs to transfer behavioral strategies to home and community settings. Useful strategies: behavioral methods, token economies, behavior chaining, contingency programs, social skills training, increase adaptive behaviors.

Language Development

Individuals acquire language by learning it as it is spoken and through mimicry. Oral language development is foundation of literacy skills. There is an interrelatedness between language, thinking, values, and culture that is fostered by effective language development.

Behaviorist Theory of Language Development

B. F. Skinner. Says that language is learned through operant conditioning (reinforcement and imitation). Goes along with nature-nurture debate.

Nativist Theory of Language Development

Noam Chomsky. Says that language is a unique human accomplishment. All children have a language acquisition device (LAD) that allows them to produce consistent sentences once vocabulary is learned. Believes grammar is universal.

Interactionist Perspective of Language Development

Combination of both nativist and behaviorist theories. 1.) Information-processing: brain is excellent at detecting patterns 2.) Social-interactionist: there is a native desire to understand others and to be understood by others.

Spearman's General Intelligence

Described a concept that he referred to as general intelligence, or the g factor. Used factor analysis to examine a number of mental aptitude tests. Concluded that scores on these tests were remarkably similar and that people who performed well on one cognitive test tended to perform well on others. Believed that intelligence is general cognitive ability that could be measured and expressed numerically.

Thurston Primary Mental Abilities

Instead of viewing intelligence as a single, general ability, he focused on several different theories: verbal comprehension, reasoning, perceptual speed, numerical ability, word fluency, associative memory, and spatial visualization.

Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences

linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal, naturalist, spiritual, existential, moral

Sternberg's Triarchic Theory of Intelligence

Defined intelligence as "mental activity directed toward purposive adaptation to, selection and shaping of, real-word environments relevant to ones life." Successful intelligence is composed of 3 factors: analytical , creativity, and practical abilities.

Cattell and Horn

Developed a theory of two different types of intelligence. Fluid intelligence refers to nonverbal, culture-free mental efficiency. Crystallized intelligence refers to acquired skills and knowledge strongly dependent on exposure to culture.

Information-Processing Approaches to Intelligence

Information-processing conceptions of intelligence deal with way individuals mentally represent and process information. Emphasis on different operations performed on information. Human cognition occurs in discrete stages with information being acted on at each stage and passed along to the next stage for further processing. Assumes all behavior results from combination of various processing stages. Analogy of computer processing often used.

Piaget's Theory of Intelligence

Intelligence is viewed as a form of biological adaptation of individual to environment. Cognitive processes emerge through developmental process. Psychological structures reorganize as a result of the interaction between organism and environment. Adaptation, accommodation, and assimilation are three important processes.

Thorndike's Theory of Intelligence

Believed intelligence to be the product of a large number of interconnected but distinct intellectual abilities.

Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory

Personalist is composed of 3 elements. Id: present from birth, unconscious form aspect of personality, drive by pleasure principle. Ego: deals with reality, develops from the id, functions in the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious mind, operates by the reality principle. Ego ideal: rules for good behaviors; conscience: includes information about things that are viewed as bad by society.

Adler's Birth Order Theory of Personality

Birth order influences personality. First-born: the leader, somewhat spoiled before the second child, feeling of being "dethroned" when second child comes along, bossy. Second child: also referred to as the neglected middle child, strives to be different and stand out for attention. Third child: usually the youngest, is babied and spoiled. Only child: sometimes socially inept, finds it difficult to get along with others.

Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development

Evaluated moral reasoning of children and adults by assessing moral decision making. 3 levels: preconventional, conventional, post conventions. 6 stages- 2 at each level.

Freud's Defense Mechanisms

Denial: claim that what is actually true is false; displacement: redirecting emotions onto another target; projection: attributing one's own uncomfortable feelings to others; sublimination: redirecting urges on considers wrong into acceptable actions; rationalization: creating credible justification that is false; reaction formation: showing the opposite emotions of one's true feelings; regression: returning to a former state; repression: pushing uncomfortable thoughts out of consciousness; intellectualization: utilizing an objective viewpoint

Social-Cognitive Theory of Learning

Albert Bandura. Modeling: bases for many behaviors, children learn both desirable and undesirable behaviors by watching and imitating others. With time, children become more selective in the behaviors they model. Set up personal standards by watching others give praise of blame. Self-efficacy: belief about own abilities and characteristics.

Sociocultural Theory of Learning and Development

Vygotsky. Focuses on how culture is transmitted to next generation. Social interaction is pertinent for children to acquire the customs of a community's culture. Cognitive development is a socially mediated process; it is dependent on the support of adults and more mature peers

Halo Effect

Thorndike. Suggests that if a person has one outstanding positive trait, it will affect other's total judgement of that person.

Hawthorne Effect

Elton Mayo. Suggests that performance improves if a person is made to feel important or singled out. Pertains to being observed.

Piaget's Cognitive Development Theory

Sensorimotor (birth-2): act on world using senses; Preoperational (2-7): reason dominated by perception, intuitive reasoning; Concrete Operational (7-11): logical sequencing, concrete problem solving; Formal Operational (11-adult): abstract thinking

Freud's Psychosexual Stages of Development

Oral (0-18 mos): sucking, mouths and lips, dependent; Anal (18 mos -3 yrs): self-control and obedience; Phallic (3-6): morality and identity with gender; Latency (6-puberty): period of calm; Genital (post puberty): maturity, reproduction, intellectual and artistic creativity.

Erikson's Psychosocial Stages

Trust v. mistrust (birth-1): needs comfort with minimal uncertainty; Autonomy v. shame and doubt (1-3): works to master physical environment; Initiative v. guilt (3-6): initiates activity, needs to develop a sense of responsibility; Industry v. inferiority (6-11): developing sense of self-worth; Intimacy v. isolation (young adulthood): establish intimate relationship; Generativity v. stagnation (middle adulthood): giving to next generation; Ego integrity v. despair (maturity): review life's accomplishments

Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development

Preconventional: morality if externally controlled, behavior is motivated by avoidance and punishment. Conventional: conform to social norms and avoid disapproval of others. Postconventional: focuses on high ethics and personal principles, as opposed to just laws of society

Motivation

Set of reasons that determines a person engaging in a particular behavior. Can result from basic need to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. Types of motivation are sensory, escape, attention, and tangible.

Intrinsic Motivation

Occurs when people engage in an activity without obvious external incentives

Extrinsic Motivation

Comes from outside of the performed. Can lead to overjustification which reduces the level of intrinsic motivation.

Cognition

Includes individual's thoughts and his or her way of processing information. Metacognition: one's awareness of strategies and methods of cognition. Cognitive psychology: investigates internal mental processes such as problem solving, memory, and language. Accepts use of scientific method: rejects introspection as a valid method of investigation. Acknowledges the existence of internal mental states.

Birth-6 Months Developmental Milestones

Expresses basic emotions

Demonstrates rapid heigh and weight growth

Uses imitation

7-12 Months Developmental Milestones

Sits, crawls, walks

Uses intentional behaviors

Uses nonverbal gestures

13-18 Months Developmental Milestones

Speaks first words

Shows empathy

Joins in play

19-24 Months

Developmental Milestones

Jumps, runs, climbs

Solves sensorimotor problems

Begins emotional vocabulary

Uses name for self

2 Years Developmental Milestones

Demonstrates improved balance and walking skills

Sees perspective of others in simple situations

Self-concept and self-esteem emerges

3-4 Years Developmental Milestones

Uses scissors, draws picture of more concrete items, counts objects

Demonstrates self-conscious emotions

Hostile aggression increases

5-6 Years Developmental Milestones

Gross motor skills increase

Attention is more sustained

Average vocabulary is 10,000 words

Develop morally relevant rules and behaviors

6-8 Years Developmental Milestones

Fine motor skills increase

Understanding of spatial concepts develops

Vocabulary rapidly increases

Self-esteem becomes more realistic

Engages in more positive peer interactions

9-11 Years Developmental Milestones

Gross motor skills are executed more quickly

Logical thought is still tied to concrete situations

More refined conversational skills emerge

Personality traits are usually gender-stereotyped

11-14 Years Developmental Milestones

Girls: menstruation begins, peak of growth spurt

Boys: begin growth spurt

Become more idealistic and critical

Grasp irony and sarcasm

Abstract words added to vocabulary

12-18 Years Developmental Milestones

Girls: complete growth spurt

Boys: peak and completion of growth spurt

Develop more complex rules for problem solving

Decision and plan making improves

Search for identity

Lobes of Brain

Occipital: receives and processes visual information; Parietal: visual-spatial abilities and sensory projection; Temporal: smell, hearing, balance, emotions, and motivation; Frontal: concentration, goal-directed behavior, emotional control and temperament, coordinates messages from other lobes

Parts of the Brain

Hindbrain: medulla, pons, cerebellum; Midbrain: hearing, vision relay point, pain; Forebrain: thalamus and hypothalamus

Endocrine System

Endocrine glands produce hormones; hormones guide the process for metabolism, growth, sexual development, and regulating emotional life

Limbic System

"Emotional brain" governs motivation and emotion. Includes the hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus, and thalamus

Neurotransmitters

Acetylcholine: excitatory, involved with affect arousal, attention, memory, motivation, and movement

Dopamine: inhibits many behaviors and emotions. Implicated in schizophrenia and Parkinsons

Serotonin: inhibits all activities including sleep onset, mood, and eating

Norepinephrine: excitatory, affects arousal, wakefulness, learning, memory, and mood

Internship Supervision

Individuals demonstrate application of knowledge and professional skills in relevant settings and under conditions of appropriate supervision, evaluation, and support

Appropriate performance-based evaluation is used to ensure candidates are developing professional characteristics and designated competencies

A ratio of no greater than 1:12 school psychology faculty to school psychology candidates in overall program, including candidates participating in coursework, practica, internships, and other program activities

Supervision

Supervisors must be state-certified or NCSP, must have 3+ years of working experience

Interns receive 2 hours of supervision per week

Supervisors review and cosign psychological reports

Supervisors offer and provide supervision only within the areas of their own expertise

Continued Professional Development (CPD)

NASP established the ethical obligation of school psychologists to engage in continuing professional development. PD is also a requirement for state and national certifications. For NCSP, 75 hours of PD activities are required within a 3-year renewal period