Mozilla

The majority of most school psychologists work week is involved in re-evaluating students for special education services. With ever increasing case loads (and the corresponding short amount of time for each case) it is more and more difficult to gain the behavioral information that is meaningful.  The !Observe software allows you to do more precise and meaningful behavioral observations in less time.  Below is a short example of how this is done.

Lucy is a happy but highly distracted 11 year old.  She is receiving special education help under the Health Impaired (ADHD) handicapping code.  Her re-evaluation is due soon and her school psychologist, Terri Monroe, needs to get some behavior observations in before the MDT meeting.  Terri decides to observe Lucy in her loosely structured English / History class.  Although Lucy loves the class, and the teacher loves working with Lucy, she is not doing well.  The class has a lot of small group work and independent study.  Terri has decided to use the ADHD template that comes pre-loaded in her !Observe software.  She also has decided to do a simple rate observation.  After she entered the classroom, she simply turned on her laptop, clicked the !Observe icon, typed in Lucy's name, and clicked the ADHD template.  Terri checked the clock before and after and the whole process took four minutes. When she was ready, this is what her computer screen looked like:

Terri then simple clicked the start button.  Every time she saw a behavior that is on the template, she would click the button.  After five minutes (the countdown clock told her when she was done) she clicked summarize.  When she did so, this is what appeared on her screen.

Terri then clicked the output button and saved the observation on her computer.  Since she had two more students in this class that had re-evaluations due this year, she stayed, did the observations on them, and saved the summaries on her computer.  When she returned to the office, she simply printed out each of the observations and put them in the correct folder.  So, when she was finished she had: observed three students in their classroom setting, tallied the count and percentage of each behavioral occurrence, printed an easy to read summary of each observation and saved the same summary in her computer for future reference to compare against future observations.  All of this took Terri a total of 35 minutes* ( 5 minutes for each observation, 2 minutes each to set up each observation, 4 minutes to get the computer running, and 10 minutes for printing).  By saving observation time for re-evals, Terri was able to squeeze more time in each day to spend with students.

* This time is based upon a real set of observations a school psychologist {this author}has done in a high school classroom setting