Teacher Perceptions of Screening and Mental Health Practices Survey: A Validation Study

Approximately 80% of children with social, emotional, and behavioral challenges are not adequately identified, leading to a large gap in unmet mental health needs. The purpose of the MTSS-MH project is to identify the efficiency and acceptability of universal mental health screening in schools using screening to systematically identify all students’ behavioral and mental health needs. The Teacher Perceptions of Screening and Mental Health Practices Survey (TPSMHPS) was administered within the MTSS-MH project to assess each school’s organizational climate and teachers’ perceptions of how acceptable universal screening and their school’s utilization of it was. Data analyses were run in this validity study to measure the survey’s preliminary psychometric properties. The internal reliability of the survey was indicated moderate to high reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.787). One-way ANOVAs were run to assess the survey’s ability to detect differences between schools on teachers’ mean responses about screening acceptability, intervention acceptability, and implementation of screening resources. Results indicate that the TPSMHPS survey is a valid measure of teachers’ perceptions of mental health screening, as it is shown to to have high internal consistency, however between school differences were not detected. Future studies should consider other statistical analyses to examine the survey’s sensitivity to between school differences to ensure the survey is a good measure of teacher perceptions.