The results of a school psychological and social work program are presented on children referred for behavioral and learning problems. Through the consultation service, the average student objective for learning problems was achieved to 85% of criterion, and the average objective for behavioral problems was achieved to 82% of criterion during a 10-week period. An analysis of the consultation activities was made in relation to the accomplishment of the objectives for both learning and behavioral problems. No clear evidence was found for any single activity being related to success. Also analyzed was the time spent on each consultation activity and the accomplishment of the student objectives. There was a positive relationship between total consultation time and student outcomes on learning problems, but there was no significant relationship between total consultation time and the accomplishment of objectives for behavioral problems. General findings show that consultation activities can be conducted with small investments of time and with a high degree of student accomplishment of objectives. A case is presented for the merits of program improvement by monitoring psychological and social work services.
This study was designed to investigate perceptions by elementary school teachers of the usefulness and ease of implementation of traditional recommendations that attribute the cause of referral problems to the individual student's characteristics or environmental conditions, as compared to recommendations that address a student's problem with varying degrees of specificity. Teachers rated recommendations that contained specifics for implementation as being more useful than those that attributed the cause of the problem to individual characteristics or environmental conditions. In spite of their high ratings on usefulness, the most specific recommendations, written in contract form, were rated as being difficult to implement, as were the recommendations that mentioned individual characteristics or nonspecific environmental condition as causes of the problem.
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