This study compared the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS; Gresham & Elliott, 1990) with the revision of the SSRS, now called the Social Skills Improvement System-Rating Scales (SSIS-RS; , across three raters (teacher, parent, and student) for elementary-and secondary-aged students. A detailed comparison of these two instruments' comparability has not been previously reported and was considered important because of the frequent use of the SSRS in many externally funded research studies and school districts across the country. Comparisons between the two instruments focused on key reliability and validity estimates across the rating scales for three raters (teacher, parent, and student) using forms for elementary-and secondaryaged students. As hypothesized, the two instruments had high internal consistency estimates and moderately high validity indices for total scores for both social skills and problem behavior scales. The reliability comparisons revealed the SSIS-RS was superior to the SSRS with regard to internal consistency estimates. The validity estimates revealed expected convergent relationships with the strongest relationships consistently found among the various common subscales across all forms of the two instruments. The authors concluded that the SSIS-RS offers researchers and practitioners assessing social behavior of children and youth a broader conceptualization of key social behaviors and psychometrically superior assessment results when using the SSIS-RS over the SSRS. Future research on the SSIS-RS is also identified and contextualized within a multitiered intervention system.

One of the most consistent findings in rating scale research with children and adolescents is the modest agreement among different informants' ratings. The present study systematically explored patterns of agreement among teachers, parents/caregivers, and students in domains of social skills and problem behaviors using the Social Skills Improvement System-Rating Scales (SSIS-RS; F. M. Gresham & S. N. Elliott, 2008). Two subsamples from the normative sample of the SSIS-RS were used. The first sample of participants consisted of 168 students who had all 3 informants (parent, teacher, and self) complete the SSIS-RS scales, which was necessary to assess agreement across different raters. The second sample consisted of 164 students who had raters in a similar or same role (father-mother, teacher-teacher). The results replicated an extensive literature showing that cross-informant agreements for social skills and problem behaviors are weak to moderate. The current study invoked multitrait-multimethod logic to interpret the correlations among raters derived from different informants and showed that the convergent validity coefficients were consistently stronger than the discriminant validity correlations. Implications for assessment practices and future research are discussed.

Social skills are specific behaviors that individuals exhibit in order to successfully complete social tasks whereas social competence represents judgments by significant others that these social tasks have been successfully accomplished. The present investigation identified the best sociobehavioral predictors obtained from different raters (judges) in order to classify children into Learning Problem (LP) and No Learning Problem (NLP) groups. A sample of 119 elementary school students from six Brazilian public state schools participated in this study. The sample consisted of 59 NLP and 60 LP students. A forward stepwise logistic regression analysis showed the peer ratings of collaborativeness was the best predictor of LP and NLP group membership and correctly classified 94% of the LP group and 90% of the NLP group. Self-ratings of compliance and self-ratings of ease of joining a peer group as well as teacher ratings of collaborativeness were added to the model which correctly classified 98% and 98.1% of the LP and NLP groups respectively. These results are discussed in terms of social skills as academic enablers for academic success in the classroom.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the Class Pass Intervention (CPI) as a secondary intervention for typically developing students with escape-motivated disruptive classroom behavior. The CPI consists of providing students with passes that they can use to appropriately request a break from an academic task to engage in a preferred activity for preset amount of time. In addition, students are incentivized to not use the class passes by continuing to engage in the academic task and instead exchanging them for a preferred item or activity. Using an experimental single-case withdrawal design with replication through a concurrent multiple-baseline across-participants design, the CPI was shown to reduce disruptive behavior and increase academic engagement in three students who engaged in hypothesized escape-motivated behavior. Results also revealed that the effects of the CPI were maintained at a two-week follow-up probe and consumers found it to be acceptable. The limitations and implications of the findings for future research on effective classroom-based interventions are discussed. C 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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