Designed for use in schools, mental health clinics, juvenile justice settings, and child welfare agencies, the Behavioral and Emotional Rating Scale–Second Edition (BERS-2) helps to measure the personal strengths and competencies of children ages 5-0 through 18-11. The BERS-2 is a multi-modal assessment system that measures the child's behavior from three perspectives: the child (Youth Rating Scale), parent (Parent Rating Scale), and teacher or other professional (Teacher Rating Scale). The BERS-2 measures several aspects of a child's strength: interpersonal strength, involvement with family, intrapersonal strength, school functioning, affective strength, and career strength.
The scale can be completed in approximately 10 minutes. Information from the BERS-2 is useful in evaluating children for prereferral services, in placing children for specialized services, and in measuring the outcomes of services. The BERS-2 can identify children's individual behavior and emotional strengths and the areas in which individual strengths need to be developed.
The BERS-2 has been widely adopted by local, state, and federal agencies to evaluate the outcomes of services. The BERS-2 has been used in several national studies of children with and without disabilities.
All of the BERS-2 scales were normed on representative samples of children without disabilities and the BERS-2 Teacher Rating Scale was normed on children with emotional and behavioral disorders. Demographics of the standardization samples are reported in the manual by age, gender, geographic location, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Separate norms are available on the teacher rating scale for children diagnosed with emotional and behavioral disorders.
The internal consistency reliability of the BERS-2 subtests was established with children without disabilities and with children who were emotionally disturbed. Coefficients exceeded .80 for each subtest and .95 for the overall score. Over 15 studies have confirmed the BERS's content, construct, and criterion-related validity.
Proud to be Canadian
