I have finally completed a project which I have been meaning to do for years. I compared each of my school’s referrals for new psychological evaluations to the school’s number of placements in special education; this provided hit rates which helped determine the effectiveness of child study teams. The project did not involve complicated statistics (no Kruskal-Wallis or ANOVA calculations); however, it did provide a concrete way in which each school could gauge to effectiveness of its child study process.
After completing this project I contemplated why I hadn’t done so in previous years. Perhaps last year’s statistics class taught me the importance of leading with data. I forwarded the data to each school’s child study chair and principal; hopefully this data will help schools become more effective in their handling of the referral process.
