School Mental Health最新文献

Introduction: Notwithstanding the multiple descriptions and principles associated with trauma-informed schools (TIS), the field lacks a well-defined operational definition of TIS. This scoping review aimed to characterize TIS intervention components and implementation strategies described in published studies of TIS. This review also examined the extent to which published examples of TIS had an explicit focus on promoting racial equity.

Method: Eligible studies described school- or district-wide trauma-informed approaches in Preschool-12 education, and included elements across at least two domains of TIS design: Organizational & Policy Reforms; Workforce Professional Development/Training; and Educational & Clinical Practices. A trained coding team reviewed eligible studies and applied 32 codes characterizing TIS intervention components and implementation strategies.

Results: 30 eligible studies were identified. The most common implementation strategies included availability of trauma-informed training & consultation, implementation progress monitoring, and developing community partnerships. The most common intervention components included multi-tiered interventions and specific knowledge areas for trauma-informed training content. Least common, were intervention components related to promoting racial equity (e.g., de-implementation of exclusionary discipline, de-implementation of carceral practices, and culturally inclusive curriculum).

Conclusion: Findings suggest TIS components related to implementation strategies are most frequently employed, and that explicit attention to racial equity was infrequent in published descriptions of TIS design and implementation.

Implementation science has grown considerably in school mental health over the past decade, driven by the persistent gaps between knowledge about "what works" to promote student well-being and what is typically delivered in schools. In 2014, Owens and colleagues outlined an implementation research agenda for the field of school mental health, emphasizing professional development and coaching, evidence-based practice fidelity, and sustainment. This paper provides a 10-year progress review across these domains and articulates an updated research agenda focused on: (1) pragmatic implementation strategies, (2) implementation mechanisms explaining the connection between implementation strategies and outcomes, (3) strategic intervention redesign to promote implementation, and (4) de-implementation of low-value practices. We propose critical research questions in these areas and conclude by highlighting contemporary study designs and methods (i.e., hybrid trial designs; sequential, multiple assignment, randomized trials; rapid qualitative approaches; economic analyses) that can be leveraged to investigate implementation research questions in school mental health over the next decade. In doing so, we hope to promote shared understanding of evolving implementation research priorities and opportunities to promote equitable, pragmatic, and sustainable implementation efforts in school mental health and drive synergy across projects.

Despite the benefits of inclusive education, students with emotional disabilities (EDs), who are disproportionately Black, male, and economically marginalized, continue to be placed in segregated education settings more than students with many other classifications (OSEP Fast Facts: Children Identified With Emotional Disturbance, 2020. Retrieved from https://sites.ed.gov/idea/osep-fast-facts-children-IDed-Emotional-Disturbance-20). In this paper, we describe the functioning of a multiyear university-district research-practice partnership (RPP) and the structures that support the partnership’s ability to engage in boundary spanning between researchers, practitioners, and district leaders, toward the ultimate goal of implementing a comprehensive inclusive education model for students with or at risk for EDs. First, we examine survey data from partnership members reflecting on elements of the partnership that we hypothesize to be important for supporting strong communication. Next, we present network data from meetings, one of our partnerships’ boundary spanning practices, to illustrate the formal connections between RPP members. We found that the partnership had frequent meetings (N = 389), with high levels of co-attendance between university and district members (33%), although there was some variation based on district members’ roles. Overall, members were satisfied with the RPP and perceived the partnership positively in terms of its resources, leadership and members, and effectiveness. This paper contributes to an understanding of both boundary spanning practices in RPPs and some of the key partnership conditions and structures that support the implementation and adaptation of a challenging initiative in school-based mental health.

Very limited research exists regarding the beliefs and practices of student support teams (SSTs), sometimes called child study teams or IEP teams, in settings with non-expulsion policies for young children with severely challenging behaviors. Previous research examined teacher and administrator beliefs and practices and found that they engage in practices related to soft expulsion (Murphy et al. in Child Youth Serv Rev 158:107441, 2024). Some school psychologists and SST members may also resort to soft expulsion, subtly pushing children out of their schools due to challenging behaviors (Zinsser et al. in Rev Educ Res 92(5):743–785, 2022). This study utilized an anonymous, online, self-report measure to investigate the practices and beliefs of SST members in early childhood education settings with non-expulsion policies. Participants included 108 school-based service providers in one state. The majority identified as school psychologists, held a Master’s degree, had between 1 and 5 years of experience, and worked 36–40 h per week. Results showed that most participants said they had the supports to meet the needs of children with severely challenging behaviors, yet most had worked with a child whose behaviors they were unable to manage. Our examination also uncovered indications of soft expulsion practices and a general lack of knowledge about existing non-expulsion policies. The implications arising from these beliefs and practices are examined and discussed.

Disasters are distressing and disorientating. They often result in enduring community-wide devastation. Consequently, young people may seek support from trusted adults to scaffold their emotional responses and to support their psychosocial recovery. An important non-familial adult in a student’s life is their teacher. However, few studies have examined teachers’ perspectives on the support they provide to students after exposure to disasters, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) with collectivistic cultural orientations. Given the potential for teachers to foster students’ resilience, the goal of this study was to examine how teachers conceptualise their role following a major disaster. Forty teachers were interviewed from three schools in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, after a major earthquake and tsunami in September 2018. Thematic analysis shows that teachers act as agents of community resilience after a disaster. The two themes presented converge on support-based aspects. Teachers provided: (1) psychoeducational support (i.e. supporting students’ well-being and educational continuity, including encouraging their return to school) and (2) practical support (i.e. assisting administrative roles, aid distribution and disaster risk reduction). Within these themes, socioculturally specific practices are elucidated, including the Indonesian value of mutual assistance (‘gotong royong’), storytelling (‘tutura’) and the role of religiosity as a form of psychosocial support. Overall, our results highlight the capacity and willingness of teachers to play a central role in the psychosocial recovery of students and their families, contributing to community resilience. We identify implications such as the importance of providing accessible psychological training and support for teachers.

This study explored factors associated with teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs in delivering a Tier 2 Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT)-based programme. Participants consisted of 103 teachers (mean age = 38.0 years, SD = 9.63) currently teaching in Singapore mainstream schools. Survey data on self-efficacy beliefs for teaching in general, teachers’ sources of self-efficacy beliefs, and demographic variables were collected. Participants also rated eight vignettes on how confident they would feel when required to deliver and facilitate sessions. Mastery Experience and self-efficacy beliefs for teaching in general were significant predictors. While quantitative results did not suggest that Vicarious Experience was a significant predictor, participants frequently highlighted qualitatively that opportunities to observe peers, professionals and other teachers with more experience, as well as role-play, would help them feel more confident to deliver such sessions. These results can be used to inform selection of educators for such a programme and in designing the training for these teachers.

Friendship quality is closely associated with mental health of children and adolescents, making its assessment crucially important for monitoring healthy development. While the Network Relationship Inventory-Social Provisions Version (NRI-SPV) is a well-established instrument to assess quality of interpersonal relationships, its psychometric properties have been tested mainly in Western cultures. Considering the specificity of friendship as compared to interpersonal relationships in a broader sense, and the understanding towards friendship may vary across cultural contexts, this study examined the psychometric properties of a 15-item NRI-SPV (NRI-SPV-15) among 2,111 Chinese children and adolescents (1,125 boys and 986 girls; aged 8 to 17 years). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a hierarchical model. The model encompasses four first-order factors—companionship, intimacy, instrumental aid, and affection—that load onto a second-order factor of friendship support presenting positive interactions; besides, a separate friendship conflict factor captures negative interactions in friendship. The instrument demonstrated strong measurement invariances across genders and developmental stages (childhood vs. adolescence), as well as satisfactory reliability and validity evidenced by internal consistency and criterion validity indexed as significant prediction on children and adolescent school engagement. Consequently, the NRI-SPV-15 emerges as a valid self-report measure for assessing perceived friendship quality among Chinese youth, offering a valuable tool for monitoring healthy child and adolescent development.

Community partnerships are important for ensuring that school-based research produces knowledge to adequately support the mental health of students, families, and educators. The special issue on university–community partnerships for developing interventions contains an array of studies describing development of both interventions and implementation strategies. These articles have clear relevance to the fields of implementation science and human-centered design, which share similar objectives of promoting the adoption of new innovations. Both disciplines emphasize the adoption of new interventions, iteratively solve real-world problems, consider multiple perspectives, and ultimately focus on individual behavior change. This commentary focuses on the ways that the principles, frameworks, and methods of these two fields relate to one another, the special issue articles, and their orientation toward partnership-driven intervention and implementation strategy development.

There is growing interest in the integration of social–emotional learning (SEL) and equity approaches in schools, yet systematic research on how to blend these two frameworks is limited. In this article, we describe the process by which a research-practice partnership (RPP) collaborated to iteratively co-create a multi-component equity-focused SEL preventive intervention in the context of a politically charged landscape related to the ‘dual pandemics’ of racial injustice and COVID-19 in the early 2020s. We conducted a document review of informal data sources (e.g., meeting minutes, correspondence) and analyses of formal data sources (i.e., teacher interviews, student focus groups) to describe how we overcame challenges to form an RPP, to demonstrate our collaborative intervention development efforts, and to assess feedback on the contextual appropriateness of the intervention. We discuss lessons learned from our partnership efforts and reflect on future directions for RPP-driven work to advance equity-focused SEL in K-12 public schools.

The rising prevalence of mental health challenges among youth has created a pressing need for effective, feasible, equitable, and contextually relevant interventions. Educators and school mental health professionals face critical challenges in helping students overcome such barriers to school success. This makes the need for school-based intervention development research particularly that conducted in the context of collaborative research-practice partnerships, greater than ever. Despite the critical importance of iterative intervention development work, such work often receives less in attention in the published literature compared to studies about the outcomes of interventions. The goal of this special issue is to highlight innovative and rigorous research that describes the process of iteratively developing school mental health services in partnership with educators. Each paper in the special issue describes how education partners (and others including students, families, and other community partners) contributed to the development of an intervention or implementation strategy (i.e., a method or technique to enhance intervention adoption, implementation, or sustainment), how data informed iterations of the intervention or strategy, considerations related to contextual appropriateness, and lessons learned related to community-partnered school-based intervention development. In this introduction paper, we provide a context for this work and highlight innovations across papers in the special issue.