Teacher Judgment in Assessing Students’ Social Behavior Within a Response-to-Intervention Framework: Using What Teachers Know

This article is focused on the initial development and trial testing of a brief teacher rating tool that can be used for universal screening and tracking of instructionally relevant forms of student social behavior over time. A 12-item scale is described in which teachers make judgments about student performance on a skills-based rather than a frequency-based rating dimension. We believe teachers are expert judges of student skill levels in social behaviors and academic enablers that are of critical importance to school success (i.e., enhanced social-behavioral adjustment and academic performance) as opposed to frequency- or rate-based estimates that are less essential to a teacher’s instruction and management of the classroom. The Elementary Social Behavior Assessment (ESBA) asks teachers to judge each student’s performance regarding evaluative criteria based on their teaching and management of the classroom. Case-study illustrations of the universal screening and tracking functions of the ESBA are provided.