Catherine Steiner-Adair, clinical psychologist, has consulted for more than 350 independent and public schools, parents, and students, on a wide range of topics related to strengthening children's social and emotional development, shaping school culture, and deepening parents' connections to their children. Four years ago, she was able to collect…

Policy research highlights educational disparity between Blacks and Whites, thereby, emphasizing the need to determine malleable ecological factors that support the positive development and learning of Black children during the early schooling years. The purpose of this study was to examine whether change in home environment and neighborhood were…

Social-emotional learning (SEL) programs have demonstrated positive effects on children's social-emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes, as well as classroom climate. Some programs also theorize that program impacts on children's outcomes will be partially explained by improvements in classroom social processes, namely classroom emotional…

The Maryland-Minnesota Child Care Research Partnership brought together two states committed to examining critical issues in early care and education and using research findings to inform policy with an interdisciplinary team of researchers experienced in conducting studies on (1) subsidy policy; (2) quality improvement strategies; and (3)…

The psychological, social, and emotional aspects of education have enjoyed increased attention in recent years as often termed "non-cognitive factors" and "soft skills" have gained traction in research, policy, and practice circles as major drivers of student achievement. This renewed attention represents an important shift, as…

Education is a $600 billion-a-year enterprise, but the investments states make in education will not benefit students unless they are physically and mentally present in the classroom. Too many students are not. In this report, the National Association of State Boards of Education asks policymakers to promote student engagement through a suite of…

Acceleration is a theoretically supported intervention to support talent development of gifted students, but prolonged beliefs about its potentially damaging consequences for gifted students have inhibited its use in practice. This study formed part of a larger qualitative, multi-site case study, which examined intellectually gifted primary school…

Adolescence is a period of profound change, which holds substantial developmental milestones, but also unique challenges to the individual. In this opinion paper, we highlight the potential of combining two recently developed behavioural and neural training techniques (cognitive bias modification and functional magnetic neuroimaging-based…

In addition to graduating academically proficient students who are culturally literate, intellectually reflective, and committed to lifelong learning, schools must also enhance students' intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies so they're optimally prepared for work and life. Successful students develop personal strengths including grit,…

Background: Many states provide public funding to facilitate school readiness for community-based pre-K and preschool programs for 4 year old children and "at risk" 3 year old children. Little research exists on the school readiness gains of children participating in these "garden variety" community-based programs. Objective:…

Publicly funded prekindergarten programs have achieved small-to-large impacts on children's cognitive outcomes. The current study examined the impact of a prekindergarten program that implemented a coaching system and consistent literacy, language, and mathematics curricula on these and other nontargeted, essential components of school readiness,…

Affect detection from open-ended virtual improvisational contexts is a challenging task. To achieve this research goal, the authors developed an intelligent agent which was able to engage in virtual improvisation and perform sentence-level affect detection from user inputs. This affect detection development was efficient for the improvisational…

In data derived from student interviews, students describe how they see teacher-student relationships function for them in their experience of school, their personal development, and their academic success. These relationships are central to students' ability to feel connected at school and to their emerging identities. Students describe how…

Although there is some evidence from cross-sectional studies that reminiscing is an important context in which children construct socioemotional understanding, longitudinal evidence is lacking. The goal of this study was to examine longitudinally the links between the quality of reminiscing at 42 months and children's subsequent socioemotional…

Background: According to the literature, children with Down syndrome (DS) have difficulties recognising facial expressions. Yet abilities to recognise emotional expressions are often assessed in tasks that imply comprehension of words for emotions. We investigated the development of these abilities in children with DS in a longitudinal study that…