Mozilla

Transfer students often come to our schools with evaluations that are lacking on one area or another.  It falls upon the school psychologist to make sure that each student that receives special education help in their district meets that districts qualifications for service.  Often, the incoming report needs some kind of behavioral verification before the psychologist can sign off on the old report.  The !Observe software allows you to do so quickly and efficiently.

Steven J. has just transferred into Yvette Sander's school.  Yvette, the school psychologist, has looked through the report from Steven's old school in a neighboring state.  Although most of it looks acceptable, Yvette's state requires that there be behavioral observations before any student is qualified as Seriously Behaviorally Disturbed.  There are no behavior observations noted in the report.  On Steven's third day in class, Yvette slips into Steven's classroom and starts up the computer on the teacher's desk.  The !Observe software is already loaded (Steven's teacher, Mr. Walsh uses it to keep data on IEP's) and Yvette decides to use the pre-loaded Emotionally Disturbed template on her observation of Steven. The computer looks like this when she is ready to start.

After Yvette's ten minute observation she had little doubt that Steven qualifies for services.  Yvette was already thinking of several modifications that Steven and his teacher could make to his program to help Steven function more appropriately in class.  The observation's purpose was to see if Steven qualified for services but Yvette was already thinking of the observation as a way to have baseline data for the IEP (present levels of performance).  She anxiously clicked the summarize button and her screen instantly produced this window.

Yvette had sorted by class.  Appropriate interactions ( Class "+") only accounted for 22.45% of Steven's behavior during the observation.  Classes 1,2,3 correspond the the federal criteria for "seriously emotionally disturbed".  Class 3 (Inappropriate behaviors / feelings under normal circumstances) made up for the majority of Steven's behaviors during the observation.  This started the confirmation of the out of state report.  

What once took a full hour (prep, data collection, calculation of the data, writing up the colums of data and inputing and printing a graph of the data) now is done in less than 20 minutes.  The !Observe once again saves time.