Goodbye but not farewell and welcome to the future of International School/Educational Psychology

Abstract

Goodbye but not farewell. This second issue for 2021 will be my last editorial for which I will be the Editor-inChief for the International Journal of School and Educational Psychology (IJSEP), a position I have held since my appointment in 2018. It has been a great privilege and honor for me to serve the International School Psychology Association (ISPA) and the school and educational psychology researchers, practitioners, and scholars from around the globe in this way and I hope to meet with you in many and diverse ways in future. I now pass on the reigns of this esteemed journal to the next Editor-in-Chief, Tamika LaSalle from the University of Connecticut. For the past 6 months, we have worked closely to make the transition as smooth as possible, and I invite you all to welcome her with the same warmth and compassion that I received. She is well suited to cherish our journal just as I hope you do, and I wish you, together with the newly appointed Editorial Team (i.e., Associate Editors and Editorial Board members) all the best taking our journal to even greater heights than before. Over the past three years, it has been my privilege to work in close association with Associate Editors, who excelled in their diligence and commitment to ISPA and the IJSEP: Profs Rik Carl D’Amato (the founding Editor), The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, and Melissa Bray, University of Connecticut, and Drs Rina Chittooran, Saint Louis University, Sarah Davis, University of Worcester, Nurit Kaplan-Toren, University of Haifa, Anastasia Lijadi, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Andrew Davis, Ball State University, Richard Gonzales, Education Specialist at the World Bank. There have also been other Associate Editors, who served as part of the time during my tenure: Prof Lisa Woolfson, University of Strathclyde, and Drs Terence Bowles, The University of Melbourne, Barry Mallin, University of Manitoba, and Antoinette Ah Hing, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. To all these Associate Editors, a special word of thanks for their collaboration to bring our IJSEP readers a range of empirically based research, peerreviewed articles produced by international school and educational psychology scholars. We have worked well together being able to fulfill one of our objectives with the IJSEP, namely, to intentionally help our international colleagues to publish in a reputable academic journal and to receive the recognition they deserve. As always, I also wish to thank our authors and readers of the IJSEP for their contributions, not only for bringing us your best articles for inclusion but also for reading and using the work published here in your various professional endeavors. Over the past years, the submission rate for the IJSEP has increased significantly to the point where we had to bring out several supplementary issues (published online only). We have also had several Special Issues on relevant topics for school and educational psychologists of the twenty-first century. Keep this going and help us maintain the high standards for which we have come to be known. In this issue, we collated papers from scholars all around the globe and on a range of topics directly relevant to the everyday practice of school/educational psychology. Simpson and Atkinson (2021) present us with a systematic literature review of the role of school psychologists in therapeutic interventions. Focusing on the more recent literature, they discuss the need to improve contracting, strengthen effective therapeutic practice, and measure the impact of our work as school psychologists. Gonzalez et al. (2021) follow with an analysis of the “beliefs, attitudes and perceptions” of school psychology faculty “regarding the status of graduate training in evidence-based assessment and intervention” (p. 132). I believe this paper will have great significance for the training of future school/educational psychologists and evidence-based practices in the field. The rest of the articles attend to the children and students we serve starting with pre-schoolers in Slovakia (Stillerova et al., 2021), a cross-cultural comparison of social-emotional strengths and school membership among elementary school children in the USA (Chan et al., 2021), followed by an assessment of classroom goal structures and the effect on Greek elementary school students (Gertsakis et al., 2021). Moving to secondary and high school students, Nazim and Duyen (2021) address the impact that bullying has on high school students’ school life, while Arslan (2021) reports on the “preliminary development and validation of the Youth Internalizing Behvior Screener (YIBS) . . . of Turkish INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCHOOL & EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 2021, VOL. 9, NO. 2, 115–116 https://doi.org/10.1080/21683603.2021.1938842