There are documented disparities in how preschool teachers perceive and respond to challenging behavior in the classroom. Teachers' decision-making processes when handling challenging behavior and how they include families in the process is an area that is notably under-researched. Using an experimental design, preschool teachers (N = 131; 93%…

Over the past several decades, the education, mental health, and social service fields have witnessed a significant shift in the focus of assessment of children moving from a solely deficit-based approach to a model incorporating strengths and competencies, which has been referred to as strength-based assessment. The "Behavioral and Emotional…

Recent empirical research shows that air pollution harms student test scores and attendance and increases office discipline referrals. However, the mechanism by which air pollution operates within schools to negatively affect student and teacher outcomes remains largely opaque. The existing literature has primarily focused on the effects of…

A common consequence for students who engage in disruptive behaviors at school is their removal from the instructional environment. Depending on the frequency and/or intensity of the disruptive behavior, this removal occurs from classrooms (e.g., office discipline referrals), school buildings (e.g., suspensions), or districts (e.g., expulsions).…

A systematic review was conducted using PsychInfo, ERIC, and Google Scholar using the terms "classroom" and "direct observation". The search yielded 1,006 articles published between 1935 and 2022 with a total of seven observation codes (Behavioral Observation of Students in Schools, Classroom Observation of Engagement,…

Black youth overwhelmingly experience excessive discipline and exclusionary practices in schools, which contribute to the growing achievement and opportunity gaps between Black and White students. This study examined 915 teacher education students' (TES') interpersonal attributions of classroom behaviors of elementary age Black and White girls,…

Involvement with the juvenile justice system carries immense consequences both to detained youth and to society more broadly. Extant research on the "school-to-prison pipeline" has often focused on school disciplinary practices such as suspension with less attention on understanding the impact of school referrals to the juvenile justice…

We examined the association between gender discrimination and tobacco use among 725 adolescent girls in the United States. Gender discrimination referred to the interpersonal prejudice individuals experienced because of their gender and included multiple forms (overt, subtle) and sources (teenagers, school personnel, and other important adults).…

Most school districts across the United States face the challenge of chronic absenteeism among their student populations as a barrier to appropriate delivery of the educational process. Positive Behavior Intervention Supports (PBIS), is a research-based system designed to target and improve undesirable student behaviors. This quantitative study…

This study explored racial differences in internalizing and externalizing problems among minority adolescents in impoverished urban communities. The study centered on a sample of 211 participants who were engaged in the 2018 Building Resilience Against Violence Engagement (BRAVE) programs. Their internalizing and externalizing problems were…

Using data extracted from the Parent and Family Involvement in Education Survey of the 2019 National Household Education Surveys Program, this study used a series of linear probability models to examine the association between family-school relationships and exclusionary discipline. The sample included 15,360 U.S. families of K-12 non-homeschooled…

In response to patterns of educational inequity, many schools implement system-wide behavioral frameworks to reduce exclusionary discipline. School-wide positive behavior supports (SWPBS) is one such framework that supports socially appropriate behavior by enhancing the capacity of schools to implement research-validated practices. However, there…

While research suggests that social emotional competencies (SECs) influence students' disciplinary outcomes, less is known of their potential to explain racial disparities or grade level differences in those outcomes. This study used survey and administrative data from 30,494 students in grades 3-12 to examine the degree to which SECs were related…

Bias influencing teachers' classroom management is increasingly clear, but the circumstances that influence the likelihood of relying on those biases are less understood. This study employed Classification and Regression Tree (CART) analysis, resulting in four models examining how teachers' appraisals of first-grade students' externalizing problem…

Examining self-reported problems of students receiving school mental health (SMH) services holds promise for informing strategies across all tiers of school support. However, no prior research has investigated students' self-reported needs. The current study coded open-ended youth problem statements (N = 1212) from a diverse sample of 455 students…