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Current Practices in Multicultural Assessment by School Psychologists
Volume 5, No. 3, Article. 23 – September 2004
Eric J. López, Loretta Salas, Elsa Arroyos-Jurado & Kathleen Chinn published the article “Current Practices in Multicultural Assessment by School Psychologists.” They state that all children being referred for special educational services need to be evaluated in a “nondiscriminatory assessment” for multicultural issues to uncover if it is playing a part in the student’s poor performance. The article states that approximately “five million” students are misdiagnosed annually due to multicultural problems not being identified (López, Salas, Arroyos-Jurado & Chinn, 2004)
According to the article, school psychologists need to accept their own cultural identity has influenced their world view and how they interaction with their student’s; they need to be respectful of the student’s cultural differences and take responsibility to provide an ethical intervention in cross-cultural situations.
125 school psychologists that work along the United States boarded to Mexico were mailed survey forms to fill out, each survey contained two “vignettes” and other information pertaining to the survey. Of the 125 school psychologist who forms were sent to, only 17 responded. The participant’s answers were “complied and analyzed.”
The results were identified by the participant’s answers. Clinical analysis of vignette A established three patterns; problems due to “physiological well-being, affective functioning and a pathological diagnostic outlook.” (López, Salas, Arroyos-Jurado & Chinn, 2004) Findings for vignette B were as follows, school psychologists paid little attention to language and multicultural issues.
Despite the student’s ethnicity, most of the school psychologist’s viewed the students issue from a “Western world view” (López, Salas, Arroyos-Jurado & Chinn, 2004) for example, the Causation male from vignette A was less likely to be described as having a neurological dysfunction then was the Hispanic make in vignette B. Additionally, the average age of the school psychologists’ was 53 and they were mostly Caucasian females and Anglo males.
In conclusion, the authors of the article concluded that multicultural assessments needed to be taught to school psychologist when they were being trained. Furthermore, in my opinion multicultural issues should be looked at during evaluation of students no matter the child’s ethnicity, culture, gender. Additionally schools need to attempt to hire and keep multicultural school psychologist and re-train existing ones.
WWW
http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/3-04/04-3-23-e.htm: Retrieved on 9/7/2007
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