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  • Children in today's society face many stresses from a variety of sources that have a major impact on thier psychosocial adjustment and academic performance in school. These stressful events and thier consequences on the quality of life and academic success are particularly significant among low-income and ethnic minority students in American society. Many schools have adopted strategies to help students who are impacted by stressful life events to deal affectively with their problems in an attempt to reduce school failure and school dropout rates among these students. Most notable among these strategies are school-based mental health programs including the establishment of school-based mental health teams which seek to proactively address individual student concerns while improving the general climate of schools. The evidence seems to support the claim that these school-based services have a positive impact on students' social and emotional well-being as well as on their academic achievements. However, with more careful monitoring and much more consistent support from administrators and policy makers, these school-based approaches can more fully realize their potential to enhance the quality of life and to positively impact the future of many poor and ethnic minority students.

  • Despite living in disadvantaged urban communities experiencing social and economic hardships, many children emerge with positive outcomes. Social-emotional competence and social support were hypothesized to have strong influences on academic trajectories during the critical period of academic skill acquisition. Participants were 282 third-grade students from six elementary schools in a Northwestern urban community. Beyond the importance of prior levels of academic competence, considerable variance in end-of-year academic outcomes was predicted by initial levels of academic social-emotional competence and improvements in social-emotional competence and perceived teacher support over the course of the year. Noteworthy is that findings were strongest for African-American students, but methodological caveats regarding research with underachieving minority youth were discussed. The findings suggest that school psychologists and others designing interventions to improve achievement of disadvantaged students should address social-emotional competencies and classroom climate, especially teacher support of students.

Last update from database: 3/13/26, 4:15 PM (UTC)

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