This article describes the characteristics and accomplishments of Maria Helena Novaes, one of the most creative school psychologists of Brazil. It identifies the people who influenced her and some of the factors that may have contributed to her achievements and rise to eminence. It highlights the numerous opportunities she received during her life…

The United Nations Convention on Children's Rights and the subsequent African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child together with the Bill of Children's Rights and numerous other policies and regulations in many African countries have set the precedent for children's rights to be respected and implemented across the African…

A national sample of 246 Directors of Pupil Personnel Services and Directors of Special Education were surveyed to assess the importance they place on training, degrees, and credentials in the hiring of school psychologists. High, but varying, levels of importance were found for the content knowledge and skill areas in the National Association of…

Research suggests that a large percentage of kindergarten children do not successfully transition to school (Rimm-Kaufman et al. 2000). As a result, a number of school transition initiatives have been developed by educators and policy makers to address the difficulties young children may experience upon kindergarten entry. Despite this attention,…

This article reports on a two year project in which educational psychologists offered consultation to groups of teachers, to help them find solutions to school-based problems. Teachers were drawn from within individual schools and from across a number of schools. Typically, teachers were trained by educational psychologists in group consultation…

The United Nations (1989) Convention on the Rights of the Child was designed to promote and protect the survival, development, and well-being of children, thus extending human rights to individuals from birth to age 18. This article examines the consistency of the Articles of the Convention with the professional standards for school psychology, as…

The purpose of the present study was to compare Thai and Korean college students on their perceptions of the roles and functions of school psychologists. One hundred and ninety-three Thai college students and 238 Korean counterparts participated in this study. Students rated the importance of various roles/functions of a school psychologist and…

Anxiety disorders are common in children and may signal risk of depression, social, or academic difficulties. This study evaluated the effects of a universal mental health promotion intervention delivered in primary schools. Three hundred and seventeen 9- to 10-year-olds were randomly allocated by class group to intervention conditions…

In 2014, the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child presents an opportunity for school psychology to evaluate its achievements relevant to the Convention, as well as its current and future strategic adherence to the Convention's principles. With analysis of key school psychology documentation from the UK,…

The Convention on the Rights of Child charges educators not only to respect children's rights but also to prepare children to develop as responsible citizens in a free society. The Convention enriches the perspective of school psychologists by emphasizing the need to respect children's rights while also promoting their competencies as…

The Finnish educational system has become a subject of wide interest during the 2000s due to the country's success in the OECD's PISA surveys. One might expect that the challenges of school psychology would also have been solved successfully. However, in reality, Finnish school psychology is suffering from the same types of problems as…

Few classroom behavioral interventions have been thoroughly studied using culturally and linguistically diverse populations, international student populations, or those from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. Yet, having such tools for school psychologists and teachers is critical for behavior management in the classroom. One important exception…

Together, the UN Convention on Rights of the Child and the USA's National Association of School Psychologists' (NASP) Principles for Professional Ethics (2010a) serve as aspirational documents that place a child's right to healthy development as the ultimate priority, regardless of the child's circumstances. This article…

Though National Association of School Psychologists standards acknowledge the urgent need for leadership skills among school psychologists and loosely define a leadership agenda, a cogent model for the training and practice of this skill set has not yet been explicated. The formulation of a preliminary conceptual framework is a particularly…

This article describes the overlap between the common goals of social justice and children's rights advocates as applied to scholarship and practice in school psychology. We argue that these frameworks overlap a great deal, with a primary distinction being the roots of each approach. Specifically, the origins of social justice movements in…