AGRADECIMENTOS
ABSTRACT Introduction:The appearance of mental diseases in children may interfere on their psychological development and affect their interpersonal relationships, as well as their academic performance. For this reason, identifying early the children with a risk to develop mental diseases' cases will permit an intervention, also early, capable to minimize the child and his family suffering. Purpose: This study had as its purpose the development and validation of the Identification Scale for Psychopathological symptoms in Scholars (EISPE). Method: It is a scale type Likert with 23 affirmations related the child's humor, eating patterns, use/abuse of psychoactive substances, anxiety, social conducts, and attention/ activity engine. For the validation's instrument, three procedures were completed: Theoretical Procedures -composed by validation of content through the submission of an initial questioning with 29 items, for analysis, by a panel of 7 judges, which responses were analyzed based on items' clarity and representation, as well as on the allocation of the items in factors. The agreement between the judges about such qualities was evaluated by the IVC and PABAK calculation; afterwards, the questioning was submitted to a pilot testing and applied in a sample of 40 children between 6 and 12 years old, enrolled in public schools of Sao Paulo city. Concluded the content validation, the experimental procedures were initiated, when a previous version of the constructed instrument was applied in a sample of 201 students aging between 6 and 12 years. The analytical procedures were represented by the evaluation of the construct's validity, tested through the Rasch Model, and also by the scale's trust, by Cronbach alpha. Results: By the end of the theorical procedures, 6 items were excluded. The PABAK value for clarity was 0,4, and 0,65 for the items representation; in the IVC analysis, 5 items were excluded and, after this pilot, 1 item was excluded, reaching a EISPE preliminary version of 23 items, evaluating six aspects. In the analytical procedures, the Rasch Model presented a EISPE with an unidimensional scale, with items well adjusted to the model, exception made to 4 items which presented pointmeasure (point-biserial) correlation value below 0,2; and other two items which presented a different functioning, according to the children's sex, the items' reliability was 0,97, and of people it was 0,60; the Cronbach alpha presented an value of 0,67. Conclusion: The preliminary version of the Identification Scale for Psychopathological symptoms in Scholars (EISPE) presented satisfying psychometric quality related to anxiety, humor, social conducts, attention/ motor activitiy, alimentation patters, and use/abuse of psychoactive substances in children with age between 6 to 12 years. The use of EISPE in other population from other context, and more heterogenic, is desired so as to contribute with evidences for a better psychometric solidity of the instrument.