A brief instrument to assess knowledge of behavioral principles.

Inservice training in behavior management is a common method of increasing the knowledge and use of behavioral principles among counselors who provide care to individuals with developmental disabilities. Typically, these programs are evaluated by asking counselors to complete measures that assess knowledge acquired during training. Unfortunately, these measures are often constructed ad hoc and may possess unknown psychometric properties. In order to provide a standardized measure of counselors’ knowledge of behavioral principles, a 20-item multiple-choice questionnaire was constructed. Items contained in this measure were adapted from O’Dell, Tarler-Benlolo, and Flynn (1979) and consisted of a series of practical problem situations. The directions that accompanied this questionnaire instructed counselors to select the most appropriate solution for each of the problem situations. The questionnaire was distributed to 185 counselors employed by a community-based agency located in western Ontario that provided residential services to individuals with developmental disabilities. Fifty counselors returned completed questionnaires giving a response rate of 27%. The respondents’ demographic and occupational characteristics were similar to those reported in a survey of 2,747 counselors employed in community facilities (Janicki, Jacobson, Zigman, & Gordon, 1984). The 20-item questionnaire yielded a moderate internal consistency coefficient (a = .69). In order to improve the scale’s internal consistency, 10 of the 20 multiple-choice items were selected to represent the final measure (see Appendix). Those items that were selected had corrected item-total correlations greater than .30 and yielded a reliability coefficient of O! = .79 for the modified instrument. Respondents’ mean number of correct responses on the modified measure was 5.92 with a standard deviation of 2.75. The modified lo-item measure was crossvalidated by distributing this measure to 137 counselors employed by a community-based agency located in eastern Ontario that also provided residential services to individuals with developmental disabilities. This agency was located approximately 360 miles from the first sample. Forty-six counselors returned completed questionnaires giving a response rate of 34%. The lOtitem measure yielded an internal consistency coefficient of cx = .76 and was not significantly different from the coefficient yielded by the first sample. Respondents’ mean number of correct responses on the measure was 5.33 with a standard