Kamonwan Tangdhanakanond

Thai and Korean Students’ perceptions about the roles and functions of school psychologists

The purpose of the present study was to compare Thai and Korean college students on their perceptions of the roles and functions of school psychologists. One hundred and ninety-three Thai college students and 238 Korean counterparts participated in this study. Students rated the importance of various roles/functions of a school psychologist and specified who should assume those roles/functions in the absence of a school psychologist. Results indicated that Thai education students rated the roles/functions of counselling students, intervention, consultation with teachers, and consultation with parents, significantly higher (p < 0.01) than their Korean counterparts. However, there was no significant difference between the two groups on the assessment role (p > 0.05). Thai students expected their relatives and school personnel and other related people outside of the schools to fill in the vacuum of a school psychologist significantly (p < 0.01) more than their Korean counterparts did in all roles and functions.

ENGLISH SPEAKING SKILLS ASSESSMENT FOR GRADE 6 THAI STUDENTS: AN APPLICATION OF MULTIVARIATE GENERALIZABILITY THEORY

Background and Purpose. This research studies an analytic rating scale for an English speaking skills assessment designed for Grade 6 Thai students learning English as a foreign language. Material and Methods . A rating scale was developed, validated, and then piloted using assessment results from 101 students attending a government school in Bangkok, Thailand. The analytic rating scale developed for the assessment is composed of 6 components: vocabulary, syntax, cohesion, pronunciation, ideational function and fluency. The reliability of the rating scale was examined with different numbers of speaking tasks and raters. Multivariate generalizability theory (G theory) was utilized for the data analysis. Results. The results showed that fluency was the greatest variance component of the composite score of the analytic rating scale, followed by ideational function, cohesion, vocabulary and syntax, and pronunciation respectively. Reliability of the composite score for the speaking analytic rating scale was high (over .80). It was found that the reliability coefficients for each compo- nent would be reliable (over .80) when six or more tasks are used and the number of raters is from 6–10 and above. The dependability increased more when the number of tasks increased and when the number of raters increased. It was also found that a reliable high Phi Coefficient (over .80) could be obtained using only 6 tasks and 3 raters. Conclusion. The main results were then discussed in more detail.