The initial psychometric assessment of the BEACONS positive behavior support individual and team self-assessment and program review

Abstract

An increasing number of schools in this country are initiating systemic positive behavior support (PBS) efforts to support students with or at-risk of school failure. In doing so, it is helpful for schools to have access to a self-assessment process, which utilizes benchmarks related to evidence-based practices to help them evaluate their progress towards effective implementation. While some tools exist which specifically measure the school-wide, or primary level, of PBS supports, no measure has yet been established that allows schools to rate the level at which their systems at all three levels of the PBS model (primary, secondary, and tertiary) are in place. The BEACONS Project at the University of Washington has developed a PBS Self-Assessment and Program Review (Cheney & Walker, 2003), which consists of 10 evidence-based practices or subscales, that include evidence-based indicators related to systems at all three levels of the PBS model. School staff rate their level of implementation using a Likert scale of 1 to 5 on each practice, meet as a team to discuss their findings and determine a team rating on the practice, then use the results to provide feedback for developing and evaluating school improvement efforts. This study describes techniques for establishing the initial reliability and validity of this self-assessment to determine if the measure warrants a larger scale psychometric study. Initial results indicate that the measure has both good reliability and validity in most areas. However, there were some issues associated with establishing criterion validity.