Assessing developmental competencies

Early identification of high school students at-risk for antisocial behavior and school failure is critical to reducing the number punitive consequences they may experience, as well as for lowering referral rates to special education. The identification of characteristics that are common to students accumulating disciplinary referrals for chronic or acute behavior problems can be valuable for targeting the needs of these students and developing proactive intervention strategies. Typical approaches employ deficit-based measures which describe behaviors that are regarded as problems to be eliminated or reduced, but which seldom provide guidance to teachers on how to achieve that result. This study used the Behavioral Objective Sequence (BOS) (Braaten, 1998) a strength-based instrument, to examine the attributes of students in an urban high school who had been referred the Character Development Center (CDC), an out-of-classroom disciplinary intervention.The BOS provides a criterion referenced assessment of behavioral competencies which can subsequently be used by educators to develop instructional interventions that are directly related to skill deficiencies. A Likert type rating scale method was used to assess students' demonstration the BOS skills or behavioral/social competencies.Data were collected on 99 students who had been referred to CDC one or more times and 37 randomly selected peers who had never been referred. BOS scores were obtained from the classroom teachers who had made the student referrals to CDC and the nonreferred students. One-way ANOVAs and independent t-tests were computed to test for differences in the mean scores on the six BOS subscales. Students who were referred for disciplinary intervention scored significantly lower on all subscales. ANOVA tests for significant interactions between rater and student demographic attributes were all non significant indicating that the results were not influenced by characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, or social economic status.The results support the findings of previous studies that indicate use of skill-based BOS scores can identify students who are a high risk for disciplinary intervention. This approach offers educators an assessment instrument that can assist with early identification by proactively targeting skills that need to be taught and reinforced rather than reliance on consequences for misconduct.Department of Special EducationThesis (D. Ed.