Over the last decade, a growing body of literature documents that improving youths’ social-emotional competencies can lead to better educational and developmental outcomes (Durlak et al., 2013; Taylor et al., 2017). Therefore, psychologists and educators have become increasingly interested in exploring the ways in which those behaviors and attitudes could be facilitated and taught at schools and other institutional contexts. To date, many studies have shown that successful implementation of social-emotional learning (SEL) programs depends on how school staff work together to offer effective SEL instruction and to foster a positive school climate, as well as themselves modeling social-emotional competencies (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009; Jones et al., 2013, 2018). The emphasis is that SEL efforts are most successful when they also occur within supportive contexts and build adult competencies (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009; Jones et al, 2018). However, to the best of my knowledge, no research has examined the direct impact of the workplace environment on student social-emotional competencies. In this study, I address this gap by examining whether the degree to which teachers' perceptions of the supportiveness of their own schools as workplace are associated with development of students’ social-emotional competencies. In particular, I examined the direct impact of the teacher perceptions of school organizational support on student social-emotional competencies, including self-control skills, interpersonal skills, and executive functioning (i.e., attentional focusing, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility). Additionally, I examined the moderating role of student and school sociodemographics on such relations. Participant were 18,170 students from 1,310 schools, in a nationally representative sample within the US.

The key finding is that teacher perception of school support (TPS) brought diverse benefits for student social-emotional competencies, but the impact varied considerably by student’s grade, types of social-emotional domain, student race/ethnicity, family SES, and school poverty. Results of crossed random effect modeling suggested that TPS was positively associated with all three domains of social-emotional competencies. The impacts of TPS on student self-control and attentional focusing were stronger for later grades.

Notably, the positive relation of TPS to student social-emotional competencies was moderated by student race/ethnicity, family SES and school poverty. The positive association between TPS and all three domains of social-emotional competencies was stronger among White students than Hispanic students. The positive association between TPS and self-control skills was stronger among White students than Asian students. Additionally, compared to Black students, the positive association between TPS and student attentional focusing was stronger for White students. Furthermore, the positive prediction from TPS to student attentional focusing and interpersonal skills was stronger for students from a high SES background. Finally, the positive association between TPS and student self-control, interpersonal and attentional focusing were stronger among students who attended schools with a lower concentration of poverty.

Research indicates that an array of positive social, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive outcomes are associated with children’s play. Play triggers the development of children’s ability to navigate social relationships, the ability to self-regulate, and to problem-solve—among other positive outcomes (White, 2012). Such outcomes hold true for play within a therapeutic environment. Play therapy is effective in cultivating children’s social, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive skills (Landreth & Bratton, 1999). These outcomes are also seen in the therapeutic school environment, via the work of school counselors who use play therapy as a counseling modality. However, literature shows that counseling and play therapy services in schools are underutilized. With the aforementioned benefits, it seems usage should be maximized. This raises the question, what barriers are preventing school counselors from using play therapy more often and with more students? According to previous research, the school environment presents spatial and administrative barriers to play therapy implementation. Spatial barriers include lack of access to a private space dedicated to play therapy. Space is often shared with other school faculty—making it difficult for counselors to maintain their readiness of play therapy materials. Administrative barriers include administration members’ confusion regarding the role of the school counselor. Role confusion can result in administrators asking counselors to take on non-counseling roles, lessening the time for counseling and play therapy. Administrative barriers also include a lack of administrative support for school counselors in general. Yet, little research has examined whether spatial and administrative barriers are empirically associated with frequency of play therapy use; the present study was designed to provide evidence regarding this association.

To increase the use of play therapy in schools, it could help to understand why one practitioner might overcome these barriers, but not another. In the present research, I examined several questions related to the personal factors associated with more extensive use of play therapy by practitioners. Might the training and preparedness of school counselors make a difference, such as, for example, if they have taken graduate courses or workshops in play therapy? These educational opportunities may provide helpful strategies and information about how to overcome or minimize the barriers. Another question pertains more specifically to counselors’ motivation to engage in play therapy. The research base on the efficacy of play therapy is not extensive, and commitment to this modality is variable among mental health professionals. In this research, I examine whether school counselors’ perceptions of play therapy efficacy are associated with the frequency with which they use play therapy with their students.

In summary, I explored three basic questions in this research. I assessed school counselors’ perceptions of administrative and space barriers to using play therapy and determined whether these barriers are associated with frequency of play therapy use. I examined whether counselors with more specific training and preparedness in play therapy are more likely to engage in play therapy, and whether counselors who have a strong belief in the efficacy of play therapy are more likely to engage in play therapy. Additionally, I examined the moderating effects of training and preparedness in play therapy on the relationship between the barriers and use of play therapy, and on the relationship between having a strong belief in play therapy efficacy and play therapy use.

These questions were examined using The Play Therapy Utilization Inventory (PTUI), designed by Dr. Christine Ebrahim of Loyola University New Orleans. A total of 359 elementary school counselors completed the inventory. The 359 participants were members of the American Counseling Association (ACA).

Multivariate analyses revealed that counselors who used play therapy less frequently were more likely to identify the presence of barriers to practicing play therapy. Less frequent users had taken fewer graduate school courses or workshops in play therapy, were less likely to have kept current on play therapy literature, and expressed less belief in the efficacy of play therapy. Training and preparedness in play therapy did not moderate the association between beliefs regarding the efficacy of play therapy and play therapy use. However, workshop attendance was found to be especially salient for infrequent play therapy users in lessening their perceptions of barriers to practicing play therapy. These results may have implications for future play therapy work, including interventions and funding.

Keywords: play, play therapy, administrative barriers, space barriers, role confusion, certification, efficacy beliefs, school context, use of play therapy, designated play therapy room

Giving advice, or consejos, has emerged from the qualitative literature as a culturally based parent involvement (PI) strategy used by Latino families. However, previous studies have only examined this practice in small samples of parents and children. One aim of this dissertation was to examine the consejos that were heard by adolescent children in a wider population than previously studied. Based on the assumption that parents might shift their advice-giving practices depending on the resources that are available to them as well as the characteristics of their child, another aim of the study was to examine whether the messages that adolescents heard varied depending on the constraints and allowances in their proximal environments (i.e., resources in the school, from parents, and capabilities within the student). Special attention was paid to the context of the relationship of parent and child as a key factor that might influence the type of messages parents relayed and how their children received them. Another goal was to investigate adolescents’ perceptions of the consejos they heard, namely, whether they found them useful as they navigated high school and whether these perceptions changed when there were variations in the adolescents’ resources. Participants included 240 Latino adolescents from two urban high schools in Northern California. A new instrument was developed based on previous qualitative studies to assess the types of consejos that students heard and how useful they found them. Overall, the adolescents reported hearing many of the consejo messages and found them fairly useful in helping them do their best at school. Closeness to a parent (or other adult in the family) was the main contextual factor associated with how many messages adolescents heard overall and in several content domains. Varying resources at the school, parent, and student levels were associated with how useful students perceived the different types of consejos. This study contributes new information about how widespread different kinds of consejos are in a much larger sample than previously studied. It also sheds light on the dynamic nature of cultural practices and the diversity among Latino families by showing that variations in structural and individual resources were associated with differences in how consejos were given and received.

In this study, I use multilevel modeling and multivariate matching to estimate the effect of suspension on college attendance. I build upon existing research that has suggested a negative relationship between school suspension and educational outcomes but that has mostly not been able to control for pre-existing differences in academic achievement between suspended and non-suspended students. I also extend my analysis to college attendance, which is currently an under-studied outcome related to high school suspension and thought to be important for many life outcomes. After controlling for baseline academic achievement, socioeconomic status, and other potential confounders, the college attendance rate of students who were suspended once or twice in the first semester of tenth grade was approximately 10 percentage points lower than that of non-suspended students. These results suggest that racial differences in educational attainment are in part due to the disproportionate discipline of African American students.

This study evaluated the influence of general and mathematics-specific classroom instructional quality on the mathematical development of a sample of Head Start preschool children. It also examined whether children's age, pre-test mathematical knowledge, and English language learner status influenced the quality of their curricular experiences and subsequent mathematical development. Findings indicate that mathematics-specific measures of quality, specifically curriculum intensity, significantly influenced children's mathematical gains, while broader measures of instructional quality, as measured by general cognitive support, did not significantly predict mathematical development. The quality of mathematical instruction and children's mathematical development were also found to be unrelated to general instructional quality or overall classroom quality. Results also indicate that children who entered preschool with more mathematical knowledge experienced more intense curricular experiences. Finally, the influence of ELL status was significant, with Asian-American ELL children experiencing greater curriculum intensity and making greater mathematical gains from pre-test to post-test than both their ELL and predominantly English speaking peers. This study reaffirms the importance of curricular intensity in preschool mathematics instruction. It also provides preliminary evidence suggesting that teachers' mathematical instruction may be a distinct early childhood content area, which does not necessarily relate to the overall quality of the classroom or to teachers' general instructional quality. Implications include more planned mathematical instruction in early education settings, the inclusion of formative assessments in early childhood curriculum packages, improvements to teacher training programs in preschool mathematics, and ongoing professional development to ensure that early childhood educators continually make improvements to the mathematical quality of their instruction.

This study examined daily experiences of stress and coping among adolescent siblings of children with developmental disabilities. Early studies of this population have assumed that living with a disabled sibling is inherently stressful due to changes in the availability and allocation of familial resources. While recent work suggests that only a minority of nondisabled youth experience considerable stress related to family interactions involving a disabled sibling, few studies offer an understanding of how nondisabled siblings make meaning of their experiences and their attempts to cope with them. As such, we have a poor understanding of why some nondisabled siblings struggle while others do not. To address this gap in the literature, I drew on models of stress and coping to conduct a qualitative exploration of the cognitive appraisals used by nondisabled siblings during stressful family interactions. I conducted in-depth individual interviews with 11 nondisabled siblings (aged 10 to 17 years old) to elicit their descriptions of daily family interactions. The interviews were composed of audio-recorded dinner conversations and emotion maps as well as open-ended questions to elicit candid and detailed accounts of family life.

Analyses of participants’ appraisal processes addressed the following questions: which aspects of daily family interactions they experienced as stressful and why they were appraised as stressful, how the participants attempted to manage these stressful interactions and why they chose particular coping behaviors and resources, and how their coordination of these appraisals were associated with their subsequent distress. The findings present three important clinical and research implications, including the importance of considering nondisabled siblings’ appraisals of stressful family interactions in clinical practice and research, the need to expand nondisabled siblings’ coping behaviors and resources for managing daily family-related stress, and the role of parents in nondisabled siblings’ experiences of stress.

This investigation examined measures of academic functioning in one hundred eighty young women between the ages of 17 and 22. Data were drawn from an ongoing, 10-year longitudinal study of girls with attention- deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), originally diagnosed in childhood, using the all-female dataset of Hinshaw (2002) and Hinshaw, Owens, Sami, and Fargeon (2006). Results suggest young women in the ADHD group (n = 107), when compared to the comparison group of young women of matched age and ethnicity (n = 73), had lower achievement test scores; showed higher incidences of grade failures, suspensions, and expulsions; received fewer school-based honors and awards; and used school special services in greater numbers. Effect sizes between the ADHD and comparison groups ranged from medium to large. All group differences withstood control of demographic, cognitive, and comorbidity- related covariates. Contrary to prediction, the students with ADHD had graduated from high school and enrolled in some form of postsecondary education in numbers similar to their peers without the disorder. However, the students with the disorder showed a greater tendency to enroll in community colleges or trade schools rather than four- year colleges or universities and demonstrated a pattern of dropout following postsecondary institution enrollment different from that of their peers without the disorder. Overall, this investigation provides strong evidence for the association between ADHD in girls and a long-term outcome of impairment in the educational domain in adolescence and early adulthood, as has been found in parallel research using largely male samples.

Parenting is an intricate matter influenced by multiple processes and elements within the family. Drawing from the earlier work, I this study aims to examine the effects of supportive couple relationships on mothers’ ability to engage in competent parenting, which helps promote children’s self-regulation development conducted comparative path analysis with a sample of 335 mothers drawn from a larger study of families of first- and second-grade children in public elementary schools in an urban school district in Northern California (n=130) and in the Tokyo metropolitan area (n=157) and 58 teachers (38 teachers in the United States, 20 teachers in Japan),. The results indicated a consistency in the association between mothers’ satisfaction in couple relationships and their parenting competence across groups in both the United States and Japan. The result also indicated the uniqueness in the couple relationship-parenting competence link across the two nations, especially in terms of the domains of parenting vulnerable to couple relationship quality and its effects upon parenting self-efficacy. The benefits that supportive couple relationships project onto child rearing may be a universal feature of family life. Nevertheless, the values and practices specific to various cultural models of parenting determine which domains of parenting are vulnerable to the quality of couple relationships.

The purpose of the present research is to uncover the cross-national generalizability and differences of the psychological process that links supportive couple to mothers’ psychological well-being and parenting competence.

Decades of parenting research has shown that heightened stress may interrupt the parenting process and negatively affect the child and the family. However, most existing studies have primarily focused on how stress can undermine parenting, and relatively few have attended to the role of cognitive appraisal in shaping the interpretation and ultimate effects of stressful conditions on parenting behavior. Following theoretical recommendations associated with social cognitive theory as well as transactional theory of stress and coping, the current study examined the association of psychological stress to mothers’ use of inconsistent and permissive discipline, focusing particularly on the mediating role of parenting self-efficacy (PSE) in the link between perceived stress and parental discipline. Separate path analyses were conducted with survey data collected from a total of 540 mothers of young children in China (n = 113), Japan (n = 262) and the United States (n = 165). Results indicated significant associations among mothers’ perceived stress, PSE, as well as permissive and inconsistent discipline in all three samples, with exceptions in the Chinese sample. Furthermore, path models supported the mediating effect of PSE in the link between mothers perceived stress and the inconsistent parenting in all three samples. In the US and Japanese samples, PSE also mediated the relationship between stress and permissiveness. Overall, these findings suggest the important role of PSE in parents’ stress and coping processes across diverse contexts as well but also underscore the importance of examining relevant sociocultural factors that might also contribute to the salience and strength of certain associations.