Consistent with this definition, proficiency trended toward significantly predicting competence, such that more proficient schools were more likely to achieve competence as measured by knowledge tests and role plays. Examination of the relationship between the SIC and organizational constructs indicated that proficiency was the most relevant organizational predictor of the duration of implementation outcomes for a computer-assisted SBI. Importantly, these differences may not be due to geography, but instead due to quality of pre-implementation behavior and differences in organizational structure.
Tiers of SWPBIS: Continuum of Support
Key elements within the school environment—including teacher behaviors and support in the classroom, peer relationships, and family support and expectations—collectively form a supportive ecosystem that helps students better cope with challenges and stress, thereby enhancing their resilience. Interventions to promote resilience have been developed in a variety of settings to reduce mental health problems in children and adolescents, including families (22), communities (23), and hospitals (24). The broad purpose of PBIS is to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of schools and other agencies. At this level, schools rely on formal assessments to determine a student’s need.
Theory-driven research on implementation quality
This system is often referred to as a “positive behavioral support plan” or PBSP. It focuses on identifying, teaching, and reinforcing positive behaviors in students as well as using proactive strategies to address problematic behaviors. In most cases, evidence certainty was negatively affected by a high risk of bias within studies, inconsistencies within the estimates, and insufficient sample sizes.
Twenty-eight studies (62%) employed randomised controlled designs. Twenty-five studies (56%) were carried out outside of the United States. Table 2 provides the summary characteristics for each study included in the meta-analysis. The influence of possible moderators was determined by calculating Q values (heterogeneity between groups) and their corresponding p values, based on the Z-values of the different moderator categories (Borenstein et al. 2010). Heterogeneity was determined by calculating I2 values, indicating the degree of inconsistency across studies in a meta-analysis (Higgins et al. 2003). For each mean effect size, a variance was calculated based on an estimated correlation (r) and the (true) variance of the individual effect sizes (Morris 2008).
Expanding the Reach of the Full-Service Community ...
NIMH priorities in school-based mental health research are focused broadly on addressing these challenges through the iterative development and testing of optimized, scalable, and culturally responsive school-based interventions. With an estimated 49 million youth attending a public primary or secondary school in the US (National Center for Education Statistics, 2024), there is great potential within school systems for gambling identifying youth in need of mental health support and connecting them with appropriate interventions. In early 2024, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced an additional 50 million dollars in planning grants to support the development, implementation, and expansion of school-based health services, with a concentration on mental health services (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 2024). In 2022, the federal government responded to these growing concerns by investing one billion dollars over five years to support school-based initiatives focused on youth mental health, including initiatives designed to expand the school mental health workforce and to increase access to evidence-based and culturally relevant mental health services (The White House, 2022). This article highlights current NIMH priorities in school mental health research and provides additional context for recent federal investments targeting the expansion of school-based mental health infrastructure and interventions. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) supports school mental health research that relies on partnerships between academic researchers and school communities to develop optimized interventions that bridge the research-to-practice gap.
- Teachers, parents, school mental health professionals, and youth contributed to the research in this special issue and their contributions facilitated the success of this work.
- To facilitate effective implementation and sustainment of MBSIs, studies should use a mixed-methods approach to assess both outcomes and acceptability, adopting methods such as teacher reports on student outcomes, review sessions, observations of training sessions, and student questionnaires and interviews (Zenner et al., 2014).
- The need to improve our ability to increase the use of evidence-based practices is apparent in schools across the country.
CASEL’s School Theory of Action (School ToA) resource is an example of a framework which provides specific tools and resources for setting up and sustaining a whole school approach to social and emotional learning (Oberle et al. 2016). A greater focus on implementation research is required in order to understand a programme’s true value and to offer guidance in terms of continual improvement to programme delivery (Durlak 2015). Identifying the components that are essential for building social and emotional skills at the level of the individual, the classroom, the whole school, the family, and the community could facilitate the use of the most effective strategies with the greatest potential for impact. Eight studies (16%) provided data on academic achievement. Thirdly, although significant efforts were made to identify every relevant study for this meta-analysis, we cannot be sure that we identified all possible studies, in particular, unpublished studies which have a tendency to report null effects.