Sensitivity to change and concurrent validity of direct behavior ratings for academic anxiety.

Abstract

Multitiered frameworks of service delivery have traditionally underserved students with mental health needs. Whereas research has supported the assessment and intervention of social and academic behavior across tiers, evidence is limited with regard to mental health concerns including internalizing behaviors (e.g., anxiety and depression). In particular, there is a notable shortage of brief anxiety assessment tools to be used for progress monitoring purposes. Moreover, traditional omnibus rating scale approaches may fail to capture contextually dependent anxiety. The purpose of the present investigation is to examine the sensitivity to change and concurrent validity of Direct Behavior Ratings (DBR; Chafouleas, Riley-Tillman, & Christ, 2009; Chafouleas, Riley-Tillman, & Sugai, 2007) of anxiety and traditional rating scales in measuring academic anxiety directly before, during, and after a potentially anxiety provoking stimulus. Research was conducted with 115 undergraduate students in a Southeastern university. Results indicated significant relationships between DBRs and pre- and postmeasures of anxiety. Change metrics suggested an overall lack of correspondence between DBR and the criterion measure, with DBR scales detecting greater change both across the testing situation and participants. The use of DBR for anxiety is considered within a multitiered, problem-solving framework. Feasibility and limitations associated with implementation are discussed.

Interpretation and Use of the Social, Academic, and Emotional Behavior Risk Screener: A Latent Transition Approach

“…These changes need not be over extended periods of time, however. For example, environmental effects (social exclusion) and levels of anxiety affected levels of prosocial behavior from the fifth grade to the sixth grade (Gazelle & Rudoph, 2004), and anxiety may change significantly within a single testing period (von der Embse, Scott, & Kilgus, 2015). Preliminary research on universal screeners suggests not only moderate stability in scores over time (Dowdy et al, 2014) but also that change scores might depend on the construct(s) being evaluated (e.g., internalizing vs. externalizing behaviors; Dever, Dowdy, Raines, & Carnazzo, 2015).…”

Understanding Emotion-Related Processes in Classroom Activities Through Functional Measurements

“…Consistent with attentional theories (Beilock and Ramirez, 2011), negative thoughts (worries) during a test or exam drain working memory capacity and provoke the attentional biases from a task to intrusive negative thoughts. This reduces performance, particularly on cognitive demanding tasks such as problem solving (Chapell et al, 2005; Hadwin et al, 2005; Beilock et al, 2007; Owens et al, 2008; von der Embse et al, 2015). Cognitive evaluation theory (Linnenbrink and Pintrich, 2002, 2004) postulates that some emotional states can interfere with processing of learning information during its encoding, storage, or retrieval from long-term memory.…”

Cognitive Behavioral Training Reduces Socially Anxious Classroom Behavior in Primary School Students

“…Numerous studies indicate good to excellent accuracy, reliability, validity, and sensitivity to change of DBR-MIS (see e.g., Casale et al, 2021;Chafouleas et al, 2012;Matta et al, 2020;Smith et al, 2018;Volpe and Briesch, 2015). The psychometric quality of DBR could also be demonstrated for the assessment of internalizing behavior, i.e., depressive behaviors (Kilgus et al, 2019) and academic anxiety (van der Embse et al, 2015).…”