General Issue
Volume 8, Issue 2 (Summer 2014 )

• Mother-Daughter Agreement on Adolescent Adopted Chinese Girls' Academic Performance and Internalizing Symptoms

  Tony Xing Tan & Travis Marn

  ABSTRACT: This study reported mother–daughter agreement on adolescent adopted Chinese girls' adjustment. Data on the girls' academic performance and internalizing syndromes were collected from the adopted Chinese girls and their adoptive mothers separately. The adoptive mothers also provided data on mother–daughter relationship quality. There were 219 girls who were in secondary schools and were 13.6 years (SD52.1) and were adopted from China at 17.4 months (SD518.2). Consistent with existing literature on nonadopted adolescents, the mother–daughter agreement on the adopted Chinese girls' adjustment was modest to moderate. Age of the girls positively correlated with self-reported anxiety, depression, and attention problems. Better mother–daughter relationship quality was positively correlated with mother-reported and self-reported academic performance but negatively correlated with mother-reported depression, social problems, and attention problems and with self-reported depression. Finally, mother–daughter relationship quality was negatively correlated with mother–daughter discrepancy in adoptees' anxiety, depression, and attention problems. Implications of these findings for the practice of school psychologists were discussed.

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• Efficiency of Oral Incremental Rehearsal Versus Written Incremental Rehearsal on Students' Rate, Retention, and Generalization of Spelling Words

  Dru Garcia, Laurice M. Joseph, Sheila Alber-Morgan, & Moira Konrad

  ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study was to examine the efficiency of an incremental rehearsal oral versus an incremental rehearsal written procedure on a sample of primary grade children's weekly spelling performance. Participants included five second and one first grader who were in need of help with their spelling according to their teachers. An alternating treatment design was used to compare incremental rehearsal oral with incremental rehearsal written instructional conditions. Accuracy, rate, retention, and generalization measures were used to determine which incremental rehearsal method was most efficient for helping these children practice spelling words. Overall, findings revealed that the oral incremental rehearsal was most efficient as children spelled words at higher rates under that instructional condition. On maintenance and generalization probes, children demonstrated similar spelling performance on the words that were taught in respective incremental rehearsal conditions. Implications for practitioners with regard to helping children practice their weekly spelling words are provided.

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