INTERVIEW OF SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGIST

Interview of School Psychologist

Interview of School Psychologist

Introduction

I interviewed Kimberly Mobley, School Psychologist for Antham College: During our interview, we discussed several tests and other topics related to special education. We began our interview talking about a presentation that Kimberly gave about Response to Intervention (RtI), and how it can be used to aide in determining eligibility for special education services.

Interview

As learned earlier in the semester, until recently, the discrepancy model was used as the main instrument in determining eligibility for services; however with the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) (2002) a greater demand was placed on actual tests to show eligibility more clearly, in addition to multiple means to determine eligibility. Kimberly stated from her own research that there was "a greater need for scientific data that involves the application of rigorous, systematic, and objective procedures to obtain reliable and valid knowledge relevant to education activities and programs.” From this statement, I thought back to Educational Psychology and other classes, where we learned that goals and objectives must be measurable and attainable. With the increasing demands by the state, for teachers, we must be sure that what we teach our students that we meet those objectives (Wade, 1993).

The second point that Kimberly talked about was the need for schools to meet Annual Yearly Progress and how No Child Left Behind requires Disaggregated Data. He stated that the point behind disaggregating the data "is to remove the special education 'label' from students." He also said "the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) does not always guarantee that students will be exposed to the best interventions, thereby improving performance," and that "progress monitoring is done best by using authentic assessment, or student produced works." Using authentic assessment would compare a student only to him/herself over time, as opposed to the entire school. Doing so would allow educators to give more precise and specific intervention to a particular student, thereby increasing success of that student. We also talked briefly about overrepresentation of students.

We first talked about norm referenced assessment. Norm referenced tests are "tests designed to yield average performance scores, which maybe used for comparing individual student performances.” Kimberly named several norm referenced tests He uses; however, He said the most used is the Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children Fourth Edition (Biestek, 1983). This test designed, for students 60 to 1611 is scored using full scale IQ in addition to index scores for each individual. Kimberly stated that there are four main indexes to this test: Verbal Comprehension Index, Perceptual Reasoning Index, Working Memory Index and Processing Speed Index. The WISCIV is divided into the following subtests.

The first set of subtests is the Verbal Comprehension Subtests. The point of these subtests is in understanding concepts of language. Similarities subtest: The student is given two words, and they are required to determine how the two words are like. Each item is scored on a 2 point scale: being a precise answer; being an answer that is ...