School AMPS Software Overview

The School AMPS software is used to implement many-facet Rasch analyses that convert a student’s raw item scores for at least two schoolwork tasks into linear school motor and school process ability measures.  These ability measures are adjusted to account for the challenge of the tasks and the severity of the rater who scored the student’s schoolwork task performances. This process enables evaluations based on the performance of different tasks and/or scored by other School AMPS raters to be equated.  The resulting schoolwork ability measures are quantitative representations of a student’s overall ability to perform schoolwork tasks, reflecting the level of clumsiness or physical effort, efficiency, safety, and independence the student demonstrated while performing schoolwork tasks. One school motor and one school process ability measure is generated by the School AMPS software and those measures are based on an analysis of all schoolwork tasks the student performed.  A minimum of two schoolwork tasks is required to obtain school motor and school process ability measure that are valid and reliable.

The occupational therapist can use the School AMPS software to generate several reports that assist with analysis of a student’s schoolwork ability measures, documentation of the results of the School AMPS observation, intervention planning, and interpreting the significance of a change in quality of schoolwork task performance upon re-evaluation.

Reports

• The Results and Interpretation Report serve as a narrative documentation of a School AMPS evaluation. It includes the student’s overall quality of schoolwork task performance (i.e., global baseline level of safety, clumsiness or physical effort, efficiency, and independence), school motor and school process ability measures, and a comparison of the student’s measures with the normative range of schoolwork ability measures of healthy, well students of the same age. The occupational therapist also has the option to include performance skills that most reflected the student’s quality of schoolwork task performance.
• The Graphic Report is a visual representation of the student’s schoolwork ability measures plotted on the School AMPS motor and process scales in reference to criterion-based cutoff measures and the normative range for healthy, well students the same age. Schoolwork ability measures below the criterion cutoff indicate of evidence of diminished quality of the student’s schoolwork task performance. Schoolwork ability measures below the normative range indicate that the student’s observed quality of schoolwork task performance was below age expectations.
• The Progress Report is a Graphic Report that reports the results of two different School AMPS evaluations (e.g., before intervention and after intervention) and whether the student’s schoolwork task performance improved, remained unchanged, or declined.
• The Performance Skill Summary is an evaluation report that summarizes the raw score results of the School AMPS observation. There are two pages of a summary report, a Motor Skills Summary and a Process Skills Summary.