Longitudinal use of the teacher's report form in tracking outcome for students with SED

The Teacher's Report Form (TRF) was investigated over 3 years for its practical ability to track the outcome in 89 elementary school students with serious emotional disturbance (SED). The pupils who remained in SED programming the entire time were characterized as unchanged by serial TRF's. The students whose placement was changed over the course of the study to less restrictive settings by school staff unaware ofTRF findings demonstrated significant improvement on consecutive TRF's in academic performance, classroom functioning, and aggressive behaviors. Those students who were placed in more intensive SED settings over time had TRF results that indicated significant generalized worsening without academic or classroom improvement. Overall, the TRF shows promise as an empirical supplement to the current less objective approaches used by school teams during their yearly individualized education program (IEP) assessment and subsequent placement and treatment planning for students with SED.