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School Psychology Program

APA Accreditation Letter

December 2009

An open letter from Dr. Gary Stoner, Program Director

As a result of our 2007 American Psychological Association Accreditation Site Visit, APA notified us in a letter dated May 1, 2007, that our Ph.D. Program accreditation status is "accredited, on probation". Since that time our Program faculty have been working in a variety of ways, to regain full accreditation status as soon as possible. The main concern raised in our 2007 review was with how we provided evidence of the outcomes of our training program, and how we evaluated the development of professional competence among our students.

I want to assure you that according to APA policy, we remain an APA accredited doctoral program. And, indeed, our current accreditation status is likely to have a positive influence on our program; that is our responsiveness to APA concerns is likely to result in program improvement. Here is what we have been doing during the past 2 and 1/2 years to respond to the concerns raised, and to re-establish our "full accreditation" status:

  • Evaluation of outcomes A primary concern identified by APA was the quality of our program’s evaluation of student outcomes of training. As a result, program faculty members, with graduate student input, have developed a new set of program training competencies for use with our students. As important, we have developed and now are using an evaluation system to assess both student progress toward attaining the competencies and our program’s ability to deliver the training necessary to support our students’ development in that regard. Together, these systems are being used inform students and faculty of student learning and development, and provide them with information for program planning. In addition, the information collected is being used to foster continuous improvement of our program.
  • Practicum—involvement of primary faculty Another concern identified was that our primary faculty had too little involvement in the practicum training and experiences of our students, and as such the practica were not well integrated with course work. As a result of this concern, we have designed and implemented three new practicum experiences put into place during the 2007-08 and 2008-09 academic years. These are a completely re-vamped first year school psychology practicum experience supervised by Dr. Lisa Weyandt, a new practicum focusing on reading (assessment, intervention, prevention) supervised by Dr. Susan Brady, and a new 2nd year practicum focusing on school psychology practice/consultation, supervised by Dr. Paul Bueno de Mesquita. In addition, there is a new early intervention practicum supervised by Dr. Susan Loftus, and a school violence prevention practicum supervised by Dr. Paul Bueno de Mesquita. With these new developments, our primary faculty are directly and deeply involved in our students’ practicum training.
  • Faculty resources A third concern identified in our 2007 review was that our program had too few faculty resources. As a result of this criticism, and as an indication of the strong commitment to our program of our Department and our College, new faculty positions were made available and were filled during the 2006-07, and 2007-08 academic years. As a result, we now have 7 full-time tenure-line faculty in school psychology.

With the full support of the University and Department Administrations, we are moving forward with a continuous program improvement plan. We have submitted our scheduled self study to APA (June 2009) and we recently (December 2009) participated in our scheduled Fall 2009 Accreditation site visit, which I believe went well. The next steps in the process of our Program’s review are that the site visit team will submit its report to the APA Office of Program Consultation and Accreditation, and all submitted materials will be reviewed by the APA Commission on Accreditation at its meeting in April of 2010. Following that meeting, we will have new information regarding our Program’s APA Accreditation status. In the meantime, according to the APA Office of Program Consultation and Accreditation, students may accurately refer to our Program as an APA Accredited Program. If you have questions in about this issue, feel free to send me an email at gstoner@uri.edu.

Sincerely,

Gary Stoner, Ph.D.
Professor, and Director
School Psychology Program