Differences between teacher reports on universal risk assessments

Abstract Some universal behavioural screening processes require classroom teachers to complete a risk assessment measure on each student in their class, leading to a possible, but unexplored, problem: risk assessment scores may be influenced by the teacher completing the measure. The current study investigated whether teacher-reported risk assessment scores systematically differ between teachers and whether they differ across both deficit- and strengths-based risk assessment measures. Results from this study indicated that between 7.7 and 20.5% of the variance in risk assessment scores was attributable to between-teacher differences. These findings underscore the need to account for and control between-teacher differences in teacher-reported risk assessments.