A meta-analysis of school-based interventions for student refugees, migrants, and immigrants.

How do mental health practitioners and educators support child migrants, child immigrants, child refugees, and their families? This article examines the scope of current interventions for these populations. A meta-analysis of interventions used in schools over the last two decades is discussed to provide an overview of the current evidence base in this area worldwide. Recommendations are made to facilitate the application of these interventions to support child-migrants, child-immigrants, and child-refugees in the schools, and their families.

Structure of the Woodcock-Johnson III cognitive tests in a referral sample of elementary school students.

The structure of the Woodcock-Johnson Cognitive Battery-Third Edition (WJ Cog) has been extensively explored via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with its normative sample, but there has been little research to verify that the same structure holds for students referred for special education services. Likewise, research on the structure of the WJ Cog with exploratory factor analysis (EFA) methods has been rare. Consequently, this study applied both EFA and CFA methods to the scores of 529 elementary school students referred for special education services (95.5% eligible) on the 14 tests of the WJ Cog extended battery. EFA results suggested only 2 or 3 factors, whereas CFA results favored the theoretical 7 factors posited by McGrew and Woodcock. In this theoretical model, a strong general factor accounted for 27% of the total variance and 57% of the common variance, whereas the 7 group factors combined accounted for 21% of the total variance and 43% of the common variance. Reliability, as quantified by ωH, was good for the general factor, marginal for the Gs factor, and poor for the other group factors. Nine of the 14 WJ Cog tests displayed uniqueness values that exceeded their communality. On the basis of this evidence from a referral sample, interpretation of the WJ Cog should be restricted to the Gs and g factors: the Gs factor because it exhibited considerable independence and precision of measurement and the g factor because it has emerged in all investigations of the WJ Cog.

Assessment of anxiety symptoms in school children: a cross-sex and ethnic examination.

We evaluated the cross-sex and -ethnic (Hispanic/Latino, non-Hispanic White) measurement invariance of anxiety symptoms based on the Spence Children's Anxiety Scale (SCAS) as well as SCAS anxiety symptoms' correspondence with scores on the 5-item Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) and teacher ratings of child anxiety. Based on data corresponding to 702 children (M age = 9.65, SD = 0.70; 51.9 % girls; 55 % Hispanic/Latino), findings showed some sex and ethnic variations in SCAS measured anxiety at the item and scale levels. Moreover, SCAS correspondence to the 5-item SCARED was found across ethnicity and sex. SCAS correspondence to teacher ratings was found for non-Hispanic White boys and non-Hispanic White girls, marginally in Hispanic/Latino boys, and poorly in Hispanic/Latino girls.

Is the recall of verbal-spatial information from working memory affected by symptoms of ADHD?

UNLABELLED: OJECTIVE: The Kulhavy model for text learning using organized spatial displays proposes that learning will be increased when participants view visual images prior to related text. In contrast to previous studies, this study also included students who exhibited symptoms of ADHD. METHOD: Participants were presented with either a map-text or text-map condition. RESULTS: The map-text condition led to a significantly higher performance than the text-map condition, overall. However, students who endorsed more symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity scored more poorly when asked to recall text facts, text features, and map features and were less able to correctly place map features on a reconstructed map than were students who endorsed fewer symptoms. CONCLUSION: The results of the study support the Kulhavy model for typical students; however, the benefit of viewing a display prior to text was not seen for students with ADHD symptoms, thus supporting previous studies that have demonstrated that ADHD appears to negatively affect operations that occur in working memory.

Development and validation of a scale to assess the symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in young adults.

In this study, the authors describe the development and subsequent validation of an attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) scale for young adults. The authors constructed 2 parallel forms of the scale to assess items that relate directly to DSM-IV criteria. Each form comprised Inattention, Hyperactivity, and Impulsivity subscales. Confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to assess the dimensionality of the scale, and the hypothesized structure was confirmed. In addition, the measures obtained show that the scale possesses satisfactory reliability with regard to the level of internal consistency, and there was equivalence between the 2 parallel forms. Furthermore, the relevance of the scale's content and its relationship to other variables was adequate. In sum, sufficient evidence is provided regarding the validity of the measures obtained with the ADHD scale, thus illustrating that the scale could be a useful tool to assess the symptoms of ADHD in a sample of young adults from the United States.