The Child Behavior Rating Scale (CBRS)
Assessing Self-Regulation, Social Skills, and Mental Health Well-Being
Teacher Reports on Self-Regulation, Social Skills, and Mental Health Well-Being
The Child Behavior Rating Scale (CBRS) measures the teacher’s perception of a student’s behavior with other children and adults, as well as their engagement with materials and tasks in the classroom.
A Brief Overview
VKRP uses the Child Behavior Rating Scale (CBRS), a short rating scale that teachers complete to report on their perception of two areas of a student’s social-emotional skills (self-regulation and social skills).
Self-regulation is made up of the skills needed to direct attention, work through emotions, and manage behaviors to cope with the demands of the school environment. Examples include following directions, staying engaged with tasks, and expressing emotions.
Social skills include the ability to navigate interactions and to build relationships with peers and adults. Examples include cooperating in a group and resolving conflicts. VKRP uses the CBRS to capture teachers’ perceptions of these two skills because it’s reliable and valid across culturally diverse contexts. However, it is still important to acknowledge that teachers’ implicit or explicit biases influence how they perceive and rate students’ behaviors.
VKRP’s Mental Health Well-Being Items primarily measure the teacher’s perception of the mental health well-being of the students at two specific time points throughout the year. These items are additions to the self-regulation and social skills components of the CBRS.
CBRS at a Glance
The Logistics
Takes approximately 3 minutes to complete per child and is completed twice during the academic school year, in both the fall and spring.
Completed by the teacher outside of instructional time and is based on the teacher's perceptions/observations of the child's behavior across settings within their classroom and with other students and staff. To note, teachers are not objective observers, and their experiences, perceptions, and biases shape how they see and interpret students' behaviors.
The Items
Includes a set of 17 items that teachers report on with a rating scale from 1 to 5 depending on how often a teacher perceives that a behavior occurs. Ten items are associated with self-regulation and seven items are associated with social skill development.
Mental Health Well-Being Items
In addition to completing the CBRS, teachers also report on five items that focus on students' mental health well-being (e.g., appears anxious), as well as a single item that captures teachers' overall level of concern for each student's social-emotional well-being. These Mental Health Well-being items were generated by social-emotional experts on the VKRP team and were developed in response to a need to better understand students’ mental health well-being during the pandemic. The items provide valuable information about students’ overall mental health that complements the CBRS self-regulation and social skills items.
