Background: The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been home to the world's deadliest conflict since World War II and is reported to have the largest number of child soldiers in the world. Despite evidence of the debilitating impact of war, no group-based mental health or psychosocial intervention has been evaluated in a randomised controlled…

Background: Many people with intellectual disabilities display high levels of anger, and cognitive-behavioural anger management interventions are used routinely. However, for these methods to be used optimally, a better understanding is needed of different forms of anger assessment. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship of a…

Disciplinary exclusion is a strategy used by some schools in response to challenging behaviour. While some studies have explored interventions that can be implemented to reduce the exclusion of "at risk" pupils, others have considered how the underlying school ethos influences how challenging behaviour is understood and managed. The…

In this article, we describe an inclusive educational programme for a young boy severely affected by autism. The programme is exemplary not only academically, but also in terms of what children need socially and emotionally. It represents best practices in action. Given the wide agreement about what constitutes best education practices, but the…

A comparison between Child-Centered Group Play Counseling (CCGPC), a psychoeducational group and a non-therapeutic control group resulted in three of four hypotheses being supported. Participants included 79 second and third graders, with one fourth grader, from seven elementary schools. The children had behavioral and social skills difficulties…

This study was aimed to investigate the potential negative impact that positive (e.g., praise and rewards) and punitive (e.g., sending students to the office) disciplinary techniques, commonly used within the Schoolwide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) approach, have on students' prosocial motivation, and how aspects of…

The study reported in this paper examined the effects of "First Step to Success (First Step)," a school- and home-based program intended to improve outcomes for students with moderate to severe behavior problems who may be at risk for academic failure. The study took place in six locations across five states: San Jose, California; Tampa,…

Lay health advisers (LHAs) are increasingly used to deliver tobacco dependence treatment, especially with low-socioeconomic status (SES) populations. More information is needed about treatment adherence to help interpret mixed evidence of LHA intervention effectiveness. This study examined adherence to behavioral counseling and nicotine patches in…

The primary purpose of Del Giacco's Neuro-Art Therapy is to help the client regenerate the sensory system at a decoding/encoding (for our purposes we use the two words interchangeably) levels in the brain while using developmental visual spatial exercises or the Therapeutic Drawing Series (TDS). The specialty of Del Giacco Neuro Art Therapy (DAT)…

This document presents a summary of the larger report "Discipline Policies, Successful Schools, and Racial Justice." Each year, more than 3.25 million K-12 students are suspended at least once. African American students are suspended three times as often as White students--15 percent versus 5 percent. Hispanic students (7 percent) and…

Disparities in behavioral outcomes for minority students are a decades-old problem. Recently, the systems-level approach of school-wide positive behavior support (SW-PBS) and its growing research base have garnered attention as a possible remedy. Although SW-PBS has been shown to be effective in reducing a school's overall level of office…

The vast majority of schools today are not prepared to support children's social behavior needs. One challenge is that teachers may not be knowledgeable of evidence-based practices that can be utilized with children. This study explored teachers' agreement ratings for evidence-based and nonevidence-based behavior management practices for children…

School psychologists are often in the position of seeing a situation, a system, or a common strategy for working with students that might be approached from a different perspective. Knowing this themselves is rarely good enough, though; they work in teams and as consultants to teachers and parents who generally work most closely with the students.…

Comparative studies of forward and backward chaining have led some to suggest that sensitivity to each teaching procedure may be idiosyncratic across learners and tasks. The purposes of the current study were threefold. First, we assessed differential sensitivity to each chaining procedure within children when presented with multiple learning…

Behavioral momentum theory provides a quantitative account of how reinforcers experienced within a discriminative stimulus context govern the persistence of behavior that occurs in that context. The theory suggests that all reinforcers obtained in the presence of a discriminative stimulus increase resistance to change, regardless of whether those…