User:Lucyc2/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
School psychology

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)


 * The subject is of personal importance to me both academically and in terms of my future career; I've been interested in educational reform ever since my earliest days of secondary school, and have since pursued various lines of investigation involving classroom reform and academic intervention. I hope to work within a school system as an academic advisor or even as a school psychologist myself.
 * School psychology is a growing field of study, with the capacity to directly impact individual students, reform educational systems, and bolster research that concerns learning and developmental disorders, social psychology, and psychology of learning.
 * I've had some considerable interest in the field of school psychology for some time; however, the respective Wikipedia articles were immensely helpful in clarifying the difference between school psychology and educational psychology. This seems to be one of the earliest goals of the article, as recorded on the "Talk" page, and my enthusiasm for this project has been significantly bolstered by seeing evidence of real Wikipedians making tangible improvements to a stub.
 * There are some headings that need significant improvement or restructuring, while others (particularly the "Services" section) I find to be very well-written and informative. There are also some minor weaknesses in grammar and syntax, but nothing that significantly impacts the article's legibility.
 * After visiting the "Talk" section of this article, I noticed a bit of a stagnation in edits or improvements. A majority of recorded edits to this article are from over ten years ago. A large number of issues were raised and resolved in 2006, and the most recent resolution was marked in 2014. There are two currently flags on this article which are not mentioned in the "Talk" section. I have no idea if this is because someone has been editing or making improvements without recording them in the "Talk" page, or if it's because no one has yet responded to the flags to edit or improve those sections. I'll plan to make my own entry in the "Talk" section raising these questions next time I visit this project, but as a novice editor, this discrepancy is very confusing, as it feels very out of line with what the training modules outlined.

Evaluate the article
Overall, I feel that this article fairly reflects its B-class rating. The bones of a quality article are present, as are some of the finer points, but some more glaring issues significantly detract from the article's quality. Some comparisons with the "Educational Psychology" article might be helpful, although the "Educational Psychology" article itself also maintains a B-rating and should not be used as a gold standard when assessing possible improvements for "School Psychology". Articles under the Wikiprojects for Psychology or Education with a GA-rating or higher might also be used as a point of comparison, although I'll admit that I have not been able to find such articles that are closely related to the principles or issues that are closely linked with school psychology and cannot recommend specific examples.

There are some small gaps in content, including some undefined terms and missing citations, which I believe can be improved by adding sources or links to other Wikipedia articles. Given the sparse nature of these gaps, I don't plan on discussing these at length in my evaluation, but have rather annotated them and plan to return to them as I begin editing this page. I do, however, feel it's worth noting that a copyeditor could make improvements to repair some vague or superfluous phrasing.

In my opinion, this article's lead section could use some expansion, as it is very brief. While the present lead concisely and effectively summarizes school psychology as a field, it does not mention anything about the historical foundations of school psychology nor the contemporary status of the field. Since these are both expanded upon at length within the article, I feel that a brief summary of these respective issues would greatly improve the lead as a functional overview of the article. I also feel that some detail could be added to the lead in order to more effectively convey the various roles that a school psychologist plays - for example, briefly defining words like "assessment" and "intervention" could easily clarify a school psychologist's job description as well as differentiate "School Psychology" from "Educational Psychology" (the overlap between the two subjects has been a previous issue for this article, as recorded in its "Talk" page). This would be a quick improvement, as it would not require the introduction of any more references and can be conveyed in a few sentences or phrases.

Most of the information on this page was pertinent to the subject of school psychology, and one could make a strong case justifying the inclusion of every heading and subheading in this article. There are, however, some paragraphs and subheadings that should be either condensed or elaborated on, or perhaps reorganized for the sake of a more concise and cohesive article as a whole. For example, I believe that the following headings could be reduced to subheadings: "Historical Foundations", "Social Reform of the 1900s", and "Important Contributors to the Founding" are all related to history and development of school psychology as a field. I think it would be worthwhile to combine these sections into one, and indeed that it would be possible to do so without major edits to the respective sections.

Furthermore, while the "Talk" section outlines some previous efforts to expand the focus of the article outside the United States, I believe some more information could be included about the nuances of school psychology in other parts of the world. In particular, I think elaborating on the educational and licensing practices of countries other than the U.S. and U.K. could very easily be worked into the "Education" and "Employment" sections. As it stands now, outlining only the requirements for English-speaking countries reflects a degree of bias that should be rectified. Similar changes could be made to the "Credentialing" section. I think a worthwhile long-term goal for this article could be some logical and organized additions to the historical, issues, and services sections which would illustrate the international development of school psychology, rather than simply its development in the U.S.

Upon my first reading of the article, I immediately noticed a sharp decline in quality of content under the "Issues related to school psychology" section, which has been appropriately flagged as lacking focus. The subheadings are imbalanced, mostly through various holes in information and citation, and the section suffers some significant weakness overall in syntax, structure, and information, especially compared to the related "Services" section. I feel that there might be some benefit to combining and condensing the two sections into one, as there seems to be some overlap in subject matter. Even with that possible change in mind, there are still some critical improvements that would need to be made. For example, the term "intervention" needs to be defined immediately under its subheading, with concrete examples and properly cited sources (rather than, for example, a hyperlink to the NASP's homepage or links that don't work at all). Similar issues appear with the "prevention" subheading-- again, the term is not defined nor elaborated on. What do primary prevention programs look like? How can they be implemented, and where have they seen the most success? The "Racial disproportionality in special education" section has been flagged for expansion, but I think a more immediate improvement would be a syntactical reorganization of the section according to demographics in the U.S. Furthermore, I believe this subsection could be combined with the "Cultural biases" subsection which immediately follows in order to improve the overall balance of the section. Both the subsections on "racial disproportionality" and "cultural biases" also contain some biased sentencing, with phrases like "school psychologists should" and "some believe that". These phrases should be reworded to be more objective or deleted entirely. In my opinion, each of the subsections under the "Issues" heading need serious attention. I wonder, too, if the section should be placed after the "Services" section, rather than before. I believe the overall flow of the article might be improved if it first provides an outline of what school psychology means and what a school psychologist does, and then illuminates some contemporary issues that have arisen in the field.

Most of the issues involving citation and referencing for this article can be found in the "Issues" section mentioned above, although there are some small inconsistencies in the citations (for example, references 22 & 23 appear to be listing the same source). Otherwise, sources are listed and referenced properly, although I cannot speak to any possible issues with paraphrasing or plagiarism until I've more thoroughly investigated the references section.

The article contains no images, cited or otherwise, which might be considered a smaller or cosmetic issue that shouldn't necessarily be prioritized. However, I think it would be worthwhile to include some photographs or portraits of the major contributors, or perhaps some images of classrooms over time, beginning with a traditional schoolroom from the earliest days of mandatory education. This would communicate how the nature of public education - and, therefore, school psychology as a field - has developed. Some smaller graphics depicting any particular assessment or intervention tool might also add some value to the overall quality of the article.