UNDERSTANDING T H E PSYCHOLOGICAL REPORT JACK J. SHIVELY AND ARTHUR E. SMITH

South Bend (Indiana) Corninunity School Corporation

The written psychological report is probably the chief means of communication of the school psychologist with the classroom teacher. The purpose of this study was to investigate the level of comprehension of words and phrases used in psy- chological reports and to determine differences in understanding by present and potential readers.

SUBJECTS

Teachers and counselors comprise two important groups who read reports. Potential teachers were viewed as a third group relevant to the study. Accordingly, three sub-populations were selected : (a) elementary and junior high school teachers, (b) junior and senior high school counselors, and ( c ) undergraduate students in a teacher education program. Of the 156 subjects asked to participate, 159 or S5 per cent agreed. The teachers and counselors were all employees of a large school corporation, and the students were enrolled in a liberal arts college for women.

PROCEDURE The psychological reports of the system in which the teachers and counselors

were employed were reviewed for a 5-year period (1963-67). Thirty words and phrases commonly used and/or appearing to be technical or ambiguous were selected. Included were such items as aphasia, neurological impairment, persev- erate, borderline intelligence, cortical involvement, etc. A test was constructed with four choices given for each item and the subject was instructed to indicate the best answer. A jury of three psychologists was used to detkrmine the rational validity of the test.

The tests were administered under conditions which assured anonymity with the exception of designation as a teacher, counselor, or student. The .01 level of significance was selected for rejection of null hypotheses that the mean scores of the three groups would not differ significantly.

RESULTS A grand mean of 16.15 was obtained for all subjects. Thus, the average score

corresponds to 54 per cent of the items as being answered correctly. The range of raw scores was 1-29. A comparison of the three groups is shown in Table 1.

TAULE 1. TEST PERFORMANCE OF TEACHERS, CWNSELORS, AND STUDENTS

Comparison Group N Meaii SD Groups X? P

Teachers 75 14.16 4 . 9 4 T-C * 12.32 .01

Counselors 35 22.40 3.17 C S * 6.77 .01

Students 49 17.63 4 . 2 4 S-T* .42 KS

*T-C = teachers vs. counselors, C-S = counselors vs. students, S-T = students vs. teachers.

UNDERSTANDING THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REPORT 273

Analysis of responses revealed differences among the three groups on ten of the thirty items which were significant at the .01 level. Counselors scored signifi- cantly higher than teachers or students on nine items: psychomotor, etiology, enuresis, pathology, megalomania, empirical, basal, psychosomatic, and projective tests. Eleven items were missed by at least half of the teacher group, whereas only two terms were misunderstood by that percentage of counselors.

A MODEL FOR THE TRAINING OF CHILD DEVEIJOPMENT CONSULTANTS

WILLIAM ITKIN AND VIN ROSENTHAL

Noruleasta Illinois State College1

The urbanization of progressively increasing numbers of children and adults with non-urban backgrounds during the fifties and sixties brought painful attention to their inadequate preparation for the academic and interpersonal skills needed to function effectively in a highly technological society. By the fifties, there had been enough favorable experience with the still new mental health sciences and professions to reveal the potential role they could serve in an attack on the problems of learning and socialization that blocked the development of personal competence of many newcomers, as well as of many indigenous residents of the growing urban centers. A t t,he same time, the increasing numbers of children and adults with problems of learning and behavior outdistanced the ability of available trained staff to serve these needs. Personnel capable of giving significant service to the solution of educational and socialization problems with which schools were valiantly and creatively contending were mired in unending diagnostic operations which prevented their serving school systems more widely in a consultation capacity. The needs for psychologically trained personnel to serve solely in consultant capacities to schools and to parents was at first felt most dramatically in the large urban centers of the nation, but soon became evident as a nationwide need.

The Child Development Consultant was described in the Gibbons Bill, HR 11322, of the First Session of the Eighty-Ninth Congress and in hearings held in Washington, D.C. on October 19 and 20, 1965, as a preventive mental health specialist, trained at a minimum level of two years of post-baccalaureate work, who would assist school personnel to recognize, interpret, and ameliorate the emotional, learning and behavior problems of elementary school children. He would function as a consultant to schools and parents with a focus upon children in grades three and below.

'Based upon papers presented at the Annual Meeting of the Illinois Council for Exce tional Children, Chicago, October, 1967. Acknowledgement is made for the participation of the fofiowing colleagues in the development of this training model: Bernard M. Aronov, Rose C. Brandzel, R. Bruce Kirk, Robert L. McFarland, and Irwin Widen.