Child and adolescent mental health disorders are known to increase the risk for numerous poor school and life outcomes for children and adolescents including suicidal ideation and attempts, academic underachievement and school dropout, substance use and disorders, and physical fighting or victimization by a weapon (Bradley, Doolittle, &…

The parenting gap is a big factor in the opportunity gap. The chances of upward social mobility are lower for children with parents struggling to do a good job--in terms of creating a supportive and stimulating home environment. Children lucky enough to have strong parents are more likely to succeed at all the critical life stages, which means…

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (Department) created the grades 1-12 Early Warning Indicator System (EWIS) in response to district interest in the Early Warning Indicator Index (EWII) that the Department previously created for rising grade 9 students. Districts shared that the EWII data were helpful, but also…

Parent education programs have been shown to be effective family-based interventions for preventing child abuse and neglect; however, to ensure their effectiveness, they must be continually evaluated. The purpose of this quantitative study was to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of the Nurturing Parenting Program for…

The New York State Physical Education Learning Standards for K-12 students were transformed into a survey administered to a sample of teachers of physical education (N = 261), ascertaining their ratings of their knowledge, ability/skill, education/training, and attitudes on the importance of future professionals receiving training to teach…

Bullying is a contemporary wildfire of a social problem that continues to burn, scar, and even kill U.S. schoolchildren on a daily basis. Not only do the targets of bullying suffer in their abilities to grow, learn and succeed; so do bystanders, and even the bullies themselves. "Generation BULLIED 2.0" details the nature of bullying as a…

Many children, including those with asthma, remain exposed to secondhand smoke. This manuscript evaluates the process of implementing a secondhand smoke reduction counseling intervention using motivational interviewing (MI) for caregivers of urban children with asthma, including reach, dose delivered, dose received and fidelity. Challenges,…

Lay health advisers (LHAs) are increasingly used to deliver tobacco dependence treatment, especially with low-socioeconomic status (SES) populations. More information is needed about treatment adherence to help interpret mixed evidence of LHA intervention effectiveness. This study examined adherence to behavioral counseling and nicotine patches in…

School-based tobacco prevention programs have had limited success reducing smoking rates in the long term. Media literacy programs offer an innovative vehicle for delivery of potentially more efficacious anti-tobacco education. However, these programs have been neither widely implemented nor well evaluated. We conducted a pre-post evaluation of a…

The present study examined the efficacy of a media literacy education, substance abuse prevention training workshop for late elementary school teachers. Analyses revealed that the randomly assigned intervention (n = 18) and control (n = 23) teachers were similar in demographic characteristics and pre-training beliefs and knowledge. Teachers who…

Teen birth rates and teen pregnancy prevention strategies vary widely across individual states in the US, which has the highest overall teen birth rate among developed nations. California and Texas, the two most populous states currently accounting for a quarter of all teen births, have taken very different approaches to addressing adolescent…

The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (OBPP) and to provide an annotated bibliography of professional literature related to bullying for professional educators. The OBPP used a whole school approach and taught common vocabulary to define the word bullying. Bullying rose to front-page…

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, from 1976 to 2009, the percentage of Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) college students rose from 2 percent to 7 percent. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), although many surveys treat AAPIs as a single ethnic group, this population is in fact…

The national Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) monitors priority health risk behaviors that contribute to the leading causes of death, disability, and social problems among youth and adults in the United States. The national YRBS is conducted every two years during the spring semester and provides data representative of 9th through 12th grade…

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that alcohol use is the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States and results in approximately 79,000 deaths annually. College students are at particular risk of alcohol-related consequences due to their heavy drinking tendencies, with multiple studies indicating over 40%…