Discussions surrounding early years' theorist Piaget's philosophy of learning schema styles and their potential impact upon children with a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder will be highlighted within this position paper. Furthermore, this paper will also focus on the need for a Schematic Driven Pedagogy implementation to connect both…

Tier 1 school mental health programs for middle school youth often focus on healthy relationships promotion. However, the vast majority of these programs take a gender- and race-neutral approach (i.e., content that does not focus on the way that gender, race, and ethnicity intersect to shape relationships and mental health). Embedding these…

Character education gets a lot of attention from stakeholders and educators to be developed; hence, many models have been created to develop the affective domain. This study aimed to analyze the relationship and contribution of critical thinking skills and social skills with students' character through the application of discovery models. The…

Measurement of social-pragmatic communication skills is essential for clinicians and researchers working with school-aged children on the autism spectrum. Many measures of these skills require time-intensive training and coding that is impractical for clinical assessment settings. Using a sample of 299 elementary school children (M = 8.6 years, sd…

Many students with autism have difficulties engaging with their classroom environments and forming friendships, which are mostly affected by deficits in social, communication, and motor skills. The Special Education Elementary Longitudinal Study (SEELS, 2000) data set was used, focusing on elementary age students with autism, to explore the…

Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT) is considered to be an empirically supported parent-mediated treatment for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but research on parental experiences is lacking. This qualitative study examined the perspectives of parents of young children with ASD who participated in a 14-week PRT with parent group…

Social skills are of key importance in everyday and work life. However, the way in which they are typically assessed via self-report questionnaires has one potential downside; self-reports assess individuals' global self-concepts, which do not necessarily reflect individuals' actual social behaviors. In this research, we aimed to investigate how…

Smartphones have many characteristics that make them attractive to adolescents. Recent work, however, has established a link between smartphone-related problems and self-esteem (self-worth) and social anxiety (fear of social relations). To date, little is known about the characteristics underpinning these relationships in combination. Driven by…

In the preschool period, children's friendships considered a crucial developmental task. Hence, it is critical to evaluate children's mental representations of friendships during this period. This study aims to evaluate the validity and reliability of the story completion protocol designed to evaluate preschool children's mental representations of…

To close the achievement gap and reverse the declining achievement of American students when compared to their global peers, several strategies and initiatives have been employed across the nation. There have been several initiatives, including implementing systems that increase school district accountability for student learning, improving…

In "The Social Emotional Classroom," celebrated educators and authors Anna-Lisa Mackey and Melissa Ragan deliver an insightful, rigorous, and accessible treatment of social emotional learning in education. Using research from the Theory of Constructed Emotion, the authors highlight the relationship between the new view of neurobiology…

This paper reports the results of a randomized controlled trial evaluating "We Have Skills," a brief curriculum designed to teach early elementary students academic and social skills as well as improve teacher efficacy in classroom management. Intervention efficacy was tested with 127 teachers, randomly assigned to condition, and 2,817…

Students with significant cognitive disabilities (SCD) almost always lack independence compared to their same-aged typical peers. To increase the independence of students with SCD, a dissertation project was conducted in the William Henry Middle School (WHMS) Intensive Learning Center - Academic (ILC-A) special education classroom. The purpose of…

4-H provides unique opportunities for youth to experience new things and prepare for their future. The purpose of this study was to examine how 4-H has influenced participant career trajectories. Data were collected using the Delphi method to produce a list of 70 unique items. There were 46 of 70 items that received 90-100% consensus in the final…

This study identified the most common teacher practices among Christian school teachers that relate to intentionally building rapport with students. One cannot deny that education is an interconnected multifaceted experience. Relationships in school matter. Yet, relationships cannot be established, maintained, or restored without teacher to…