Teacher's Ratings of Students' Behavior. An Evaluation of The LSL (Teacher's Report Checklist for Social and Learning Behavior)

This study analyzes the psychometric properties and selected validity aspects of a teacher's report checklist for social and learning behavior (LSL; Petermann & Petermann, 2006). A sample of N = 72 elementary school teachers rated the social and learning behavior of N = 665 elementary school students. The psychometric properties of the postulated ten scales (four learning behavior scales and six social behavior scales) were comparable to the values reported by the test authors. The postulated ten-factorial structure of the LSL could, however, not be confirmed in item-based confirmatory factor analyses; a structure with two broad factors (learning behavior, social behavior) was confirmed in scale-based confirmatory factor analyses. Correlations with different aspects of the teacher-rated learning and social behavior and with grades for learning behavior, social behavior, mathematics, and German mainly evidenced convergent validity. Evidence for divergent validity occurred only regarding scales between the two broad facets (learning behavior, social behavior) but not within these broad facets. Ratings of the ten LSL-aspects with only one global item per scale yielded high correlations with the corresponding original LSL-scale. Correlations of these global judgments with the other assessed variables were comparable with the correlations of the original LSL-scales with these other variables.