There has been increasing discussion about the importance of building students' social-emotional competencies for their academic and behavioral success (Jones, Brush, Bailey, Brion-Meisels, McIntyre, Kahn, Nelson, & Stickle, 2017). However, the majority of these discussions focus on social-emotional skills (SEL) as a universal intervention,…

Despite the intuitive appeal of purpose as a subject of inquiry and its associations with positive life outcomes, empirical research on adolescent purpose is limited. This exploratory study examined several dimensions of purpose--classification, engagement, and commitment--based on essay and survey responses from a sample of 124 low-SES and…

The study explored whether aspects of elementary students' writing about their personal values could predict if students were considered more at risk or more resilient. Essays from 176 fifth-grade students (79.54% African American, 20.46% Hispanic) from a low-income, urban district in New Jersey were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word…

This article uses a multiyear case example to illustrate principles of comprehensive program consultation to low-performing urban school districts. The Plainfield (NJ) school district concluded that leaving no urban child behind required school personnel to attend to students' academic, social, and emotional development in an integrated, ongoing…

Action research is well grounded in the worlds of organizational and community psychology. The practice of action research within each of these fields has been shaped by their dominant settings, theories, and values; where these diverge, rich learning opportunities have been created. Each phase of the action research cycle has particular…