This study involved a secondary analysis of data collected across the 2016-2017 academic year to determine the impact on students' social and emotional well-being of a new hip-hop lyricism course implemented by a school counselor. The new course introduced hip-hop and spoken word therapy into a specially designed classroom curriculum to meet the…

Background: Although school climate is linked with youth educational, socioemotional, behavioral, and health outcomes, there has been limited research on the association between school climate and mental health education efforts. This study explored whether school climate was associated with students' depression literacy and mental health stigma…

This report is an extension of the 2018 report, "Teen Sport in America: Why Participation Matters Report" which set out to identify the health, academic, and psychological benefits that teen girls obtain on a sport-by-sport basis. The original 2018 Teen Sport report provided evidence of the important role that sports can play in…

Since research shows that interactive prevention programs are more effective than didactic-based lectures, the current study examined the efficacy of an interactive substance abuse prevention program for adolescents. Participants completed pre- and post-surveys examining their substance use knowledge and program perceptions. The program included…

The present study reports on the psychometric defensibility of the Psychological Wellbeing and Distress Screener (PWDS), which is a 10-item self-report behavior rating scale for measuring youth's bidimensional (also known as dual-factor or two-continua) mental health. The PWDS was developed using preexisting items within the Health Behavior in…

Research has shown that students in Advanced Placement (AP) classes and International Baccalaureate (IB) programs experience higher levels of stress compared to students in general education classes. Elevated stress can serve as a risk factor for students' academic and mental health problems. Given the documented stress of these students,…

Safety is essential to student well-being and success. Because of this, a large percentage of parents and children are concerned about school safety. To get a better understanding of school safety from a student's perspective, ACT-tested students were surveyed and asked about their school's climate and the types of safety measures their school…

Is compulsive Internet use (CIU) an antecedent to poor mental health, a consequence, or both? Study 1 used a longitudinal design to track the development of CIU and mental health in Grade 8 (N = 1,030 males, 1,038 females, M[subscript age] = 13.7), 9, 10, and 11. Study 2 extended Study 1 by examining the kinds of Internet behaviors most strongly…

Student self-reports of resiliency and social-emotional internalizing problems were examined to determine intervention effects of a culturally adapted social and emotional learning (SEL) program. Data were analyzed from 20 culturally and linguistically diverse high school students who participated in a school-based 12-lesson SEL intervention and…

Early school-based mental health screeners were informed by a deficit paradigm that aimed to identify psychological distress symptoms. In comparison, following a whole-child perspective, a dual-factor approach has been proposed that assesses complete mental health using both positive dispositions and distress symptoms. Applying the dual-factor…

This study applies cumulative adversity and stress proliferation theories to examine risk and protective resource profiles of youth with three different levels of housing and parental care instability. Data derive from a state representative sample (n=27,087) of school-based adolescent students. ANCOVA analyses identified significant differences…

The COVID-19 pandemic may be one of the greatest challenges our provincial education system has ever addressed. In the spring of 2020, many governments around the world ordered schools to suspend in-person instruction for most of their students, requiring education systems to pivot almost overnight to online or remote teaching and virtual…

Parental involvement in education remains important for facilitating positive youth development. This study conceptualized parental involvement as a multidimensional construct--including school-based involvement, home-based involvement, and academic socialization--and examined the effects of different types of parental involvement in 10th grade on…

Consistent with a positive psychology framework, this study examined the contributions of personality, environmental, and perceived social support variables in classifying adolescents using Greenspoon and Saklofske's Dual-Factor model of mental health. This model incorporates information about positive subjective well-being (SWB), along with…

Suicide remains the third leading cause of death among young people in the United States. Considering that youth who contemplate suicide generally exhibit warning signs before engaging in lethal self-harm, school-based mental health professionals can play a vital role in identifying students who are at risk for suicidal behavior. Nevertheless, the…