There is a need for free, brief, psychometrically sound measures to support youth measurement-based care across settings. Two instruments, the standardized Behavior and Feelings Survey (BFS) and the idiographic Top Problems Assessment (TPA), have shown evidence of validity, reliability, and sensitivity to change by parent and youth report. Extending this measurement suite, we examined the psychometric properties of new teacher-report versions of the BFS and TPA. Participants were 110 youths (ages 7-13, 41.6% female) referred for school-based therapy for internalizing and/or externalizing problems. Multiinformant BFS and TPA measures were administered at pre- and posttreatment and repeatedly throughout treatment. Analyses evaluated the teacher-reported BFS-T and TPA-T across informants (relative to the parallel parent and youth versions), within-informant (relative to the Teacher Report Form), and longitudinally throughout treatment. Results showed that the BFS-T scale scores (internalizing, externalizing, and total) had good internal consistency and distributions comparable to parent/youth data. Factor analyses supported the BFS's original correlated two-factor structure with minor informant-specific modifications that do not impact scoring or interpretation. The BFS-T and TPA-T showed evidence of convergent and discriminant validity with other multiinformant measures. Longitudinal multilevel models documented sensitivity to change via negative loglinear slopes (ps < .005). Mean teacher-report trajectories resembled parent- and youth-report trajectories, but cross-informant correlations were mostly not significant, suggesting incremental utility of teacher report. The BFS and TPA are free, brief, incrementally useful, and psychometrically sound tools for measurement-based care in youth therapy-now including teacher-report forms to complement the original parent- and youth-report forms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Evans et al. (2026) studied this question.