Targeted school-based programs seem to be a promising approach to help adolescents in need. Nevertheless, successful implementation and evaluation of such programs is challenging. However, there is limited knowledge about (overcoming) the challenges of implementation and experimental evaluation of school-based programs. The goal of the present…

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting stay-at-home orders created a need for assessing elementary, middle, and high school students' experienced stressors associated with the coronavirus situation. In collaboration with a school district wanting information about their students' well-being during the pandemic school shut-down, the current study…

Sociocultural language learning theory and situated learning theory stress the importance of social interactions and context in both science and language learning. In addition, researchers have highlighted the important role that multimodal language plays in meaning-making and communication in science. The purpose of this study was to examine the…

The current study investigated the associations among student perceptions of COVID-19 stress, internalizing problems, and school social support (teacher and classmate support) and how these relations differed across elementary/middle and high school students. Based on data from 526 4th- through 12th-grade students from a school district in the…

COVID-19 began to spread all over the world in the Spring of 2020. All schools, including the institutions serving students with special needs, were closed to decrease the spread of the virus. The schools had to shift to online education, which was a new experience for most students. In addition to the negative effects of the pandemic itself, the…

Learners from underserved backgrounds tend to show lower levels of college readiness (ACT, 2016a; ACT, 2018). In part to address these disparities, the authors investigated growth in social and emotional (SE) skills in a cohort of largely Hispanic, high-poverty students who participated in GEAR UP. GEAR UP is a discretionary federal grant program…

Friendships can provide a critical buffer against stress for youth, but the extent to which they serve this role depends on whether they provide resources that youth value most. These valued provisions may differ for girls and boys and across stages of development. This study examined whether gender differences in friendship values intensify…

Recent evidence suggests that helping students reappraise common social and academic worries during the difficult transition to middle school can improve their academic achievement. To further test this outcome, we conducted a pre-registered randomized controlled trial at scale among students transitioning to middle school in seventh grade (N =…

Middle school students are in even more need of social and emotional support due to the cognitive, social, and emotional changes occurring at this stage of their development (Caskey & Anfara, 2014), and their teachers are key players in providing what is needed. Unfortunately, there are few Institutions of Higher Education that offer programs…

School closure and distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic have posed several challenges to children. Drawing upon the social--ecological framework, in this preliminary study, we tested what factors may help to explain students' difficulties with distance learning during COVID-19 lockdown, by analyzing family, school, and individual…

Despite evidence that acculturation hassles (such as discrimination and language hassles) relate to poorer adjustment for adolescents of immigrant descent, we know less about the psychological processes underlying these associations. In this study, we test whether reduced psychological needs satisfaction in terms of a lower sense of belonging,…

The present study used a sample of Chinese rural-to-urban migrants in early adolescence to examine whether emotional awareness (EA) moderated the expected association between status-based discrimination and emotional-behavioral problems and whether patterns of associations differed across informants (self-report vs. teacher-report). A total of 169…