Volume_5_Issue_4_Digest

12 TPC Digest Gwen Bass Jihee Lee Craig Wells John C. Carey Sangmin Lee Development and Factor Analysis of the Protective Factors Index A Report Card Section Related to the Work of School Counselors This article describes the development and initial exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the Protective Factors Index (PFI), a 13-item social-emotional report card. The PFI was developed using the Construct-Based Approach (CBA) to school counseling (Squire et al., 2014), and is based on the premise that prevention efforts should be focused on factors that are demonstrated by research to be malleable and associated with academic achievement and well-being. The CBA clusters constructs into four areas reflecting motivation, self-direction, self-knowledge and relationship competence . The PFI component of the report card consists of 13 questions, organized into four segments, based on the construct-based standards: motivation, self-direction, self-knowledge , and relationships . The purpose of this study was to establish the factor structure of the instrument as the first step in establishing its validity. By incorporating the PFI into the student report card, pertinent student-level achievement-related data was collected from teachers for use by counselors. The format for teachers to evaluate their students includes dichotomous response options: “on target” and “struggling.” All classroom teachers receive the assessment and the scoring rubric that corresponds to their grade level. The sample for this study was highly diverse in terms of race and included students across kindergarten through fifth-grade levels. All classroom teachers in the district’s four elementary schools completed the PFI for each student in their class at three intervals during the 2013–2014 school year. The data collected in the fall and winter terms were divided into two sections for analysis. The factor analyses in this study were used to explore how teachers’ ratings of students’ behavior on the 13-item PFI scale clustered around specific constructs that are connected to achievement and underlie many school counseling interventions. Considering parsimony and interpretability, the EFA and two CFAs all resulted in the selection of a three-factor model as the best fit for the data. In this model, the fundamental constructs associated with students’ academic behavior identified are “academic temperament,” “self-knowledge” and “motivation.” “Self-knowledge” and “motivation” correspond to two of the four construct clusters identified by Squire et al. (2014) as critical socio-emotional dimensions related to achievement. The “academic temperament” items reflected either self-regulation skills or the ability to engage in productive relationships in school. Squire et al. (2014) differentiated between self-direction (including emotional self-regulation constructs) and relationship skills clusters. Although not perfectly aligned, this factor structure of the PFI is consistent with the CBA model for clustering student competencies and corresponds to previous research on the links between construct-based skills and academic achievement. Teacher ratings on the PFI seemed to reflect perceptions that self-regulation abilities and good relationship skills are closely related constructs. These results indicate that the PFI may be a useful instrument for identifying elementary students’ strengths and needs in terms of exhibiting developmentally-appropriate skills that are known to influence academic achievement and personal well-being. The PFI has the potential to become an efficient and accurate way for school counselors to collect data from teachers about student performance than can be used to target intervention. Gwen Bass is a doctoral researcher at the Ronald Fredrickson Center for School Counseling Outcome Research at the University of Massachusetts. Jihee Lee is a doctoral student at Korea University in South Korea and Center Fellow of the Ronald H. Fredrickson Center for School Counseling Outcome Research at the University of Massachusetts. Craig Wells is an Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts. John C. Carey is a Professor and the Director of the Ronald H. Frederickson Center for School Counseling Outcome Research at the University of Massachusetts. Sangmin Lee is an Associate Professor at Korea University. Correspondence can be addressed to Gwen Bass, School of Cognitive Science, Adele Simmons Hall, Hampshire College, 893 West Street, Amherst, MA 01002, gjbass@gmail.com .