Joshua L. Brown

Resolving conflict creatively: Evaluating the developmental effects of a school-based violence prevention program in neighborhood and classroom context.

This study evaluated the short-term impact of a school-based violence prevention initiative on developmental processes thought to place children at risk for future aggression and violence and examined the influence of classroom and neighborhood contexts on the effectiveness of the violence prevention initiative. Two waves of developmental data (fall and spring) were analyzed from the 1st year of the evaluation of the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program (RCCP), which includes 5053 children from grades two to six from 11 elementary schools in New York City. Three distinct profiles of exposure to the intervention were derived from Management Information System (MIS) data on between classroom differences in teacher Training and Coaching in RCCP, Classroom Instruction in RCCP, and percentages of students who are Peer Mediators. Developmental processes that place children at risk were found to increase over the course of the school year. Children whose teachers had a moderate amount of training and coaching from RCCP and who taught many lessons showed significantly slower growth in aggression-related processes, and less of a decrease in competence-related processes, compared to children whose teachers taught few or no lessons. Contrary to expectation, children whose teachers had a higher level of training and coaching in the RCCP but taught few lessons showed significantly faster growth over time in aggressive cognitions and behaviors. The impact of the intervention on childrens social cognitions (but not on their interpersonal behaviors) varied by context. Specifically the positive effect of High Lessons was dampened for children in high-risk classrooms and neighborhoods. Implications for future research on developmental psychopathology in context and for the design of preventive interventions are discussed.

Two‐Year Impacts of a Universal School‐Based Social‐Emotional and Literacy Intervention: An Experiment in Translational Developmental Research

This study contributes to ongoing scholarship at the nexus of translational research, education reform, and the developmental and prevention sciences. It reports 2-year experimental impacts of a universal, integrated school-based intervention in social-emotional learning and literacy development on childrens social-emotional, behavioral, and academic functioning. The study employed a school-randomized, experimental design with 1,184 children in 18 elementary schools. Children in the intervention schools showed improvements across several domains: self-reports of hostile attributional bias, aggressive interpersonal negotiation strategies, and depression, and teacher reports of attention skills, and aggressive and socially competent behavior. In addition, there were effects of the intervention on childrens math and reading achievement for those identified by teachers at baseline at highest behavioral risk. These findings are interpreted in light of developmental cascades theory and lend support to the value of universal, integrated interventions in the elementary school period for promoting childrens social-emotional and academic skills.

Teaching through interactions: Testing a developmental framework of teacher effectiveness in over 4,000 classrooms

This is a copy of an article published in the Elementary School Journal

A School-Randomized Clinical Trial of an Integrated Social–Emotional Learning and Literacy Intervention: Impacts After 1 School Year

OBJECTIVE To report experimental impacts of a universal, integrated school-based intervention in social-emotional learning and literacy development on change over 1 school year in 3rd-grade childrens social-emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes. METHOD This study employed a school-randomized, experimental design and included 942 3rd-grade children (49% boys; 45.6% Hispanic/Latino, 41.1% Black/African American, 4.7% non-Hispanic White, and 8.6% other racial/ethnic groups, including Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American) in 18 New York City public elementary schools. Data on childrens social-cognitive processes (e.g., hostile attribution biases), behavioral symptomatology (e.g., conduct problems), and literacy skills and academic achievement (e.g., reading achievement) were collected in the fall and spring of 1 school year. RESULTS There were main effects of the 4Rs Program after 1 year on only 2 of the 13 outcomes examined. These include childrens self-reports of hostile attributional biases (Cohens d = 0.20) and depression (d = 0.24). As expected based on program and developmental theory, there were impacts of the intervention for those children identified by teachers at baseline with the highest levels of aggression (d = 0.32-0.59) on 4 other outcomes: childrens self-reports of aggressive fantasies, teacher reports of academic skills, reading achievement scaled scores, and childrens attendance. CONCLUSIONS This report of effects of the 4Rs intervention on individual children across domains of functioning after 1 school year represents an important first step in establishing a better understanding of what is achievable by a schoolwide intervention such as the 4Rs in its earliest stages of unfolding. The first-year impacts, combined with our knowledge of sustained and expanded effects after a second year, provide evidence that this intervention may be initiating positive developmental cascades both in the general population of students and among those at highest behavioral risk. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

Mediation and spillover effects in group-randomized trials: a case study of the 4Rs educational intervention.

Peer influence and social interactions can give rise to spillover effects in which the exposure of one individual may affect outcomes of other individuals. Even if the intervention under study occurs at the group or cluster level as in group-randomized trials, spillover effects can occur when the mediator of interest is measured at a lower level than the treatment. Evaluators who choose groups rather than individuals as experimental units in a randomized trial often anticipate that the desirable changes in targeted social behaviors will be reinforced through interference among individuals in a group exposed to the same treatment. In an empirical evaluation of the effect of a school-wide intervention on reducing individual students’ depressive symptoms, schools in matched pairs were randomly assigned to the 4Rs intervention or the control condition. Class quality was hypothesized as an important mediator assessed at the classroom level. We reason that the quality of one classroom may affect outcomes of children in another classroom because children interact not simply with their classmates but also with those from other classes in the hallways or on the playground. In investigating the role of class quality as a mediator, failure to account for such spillover effects of one classroom on the outcomes of children in other classrooms can potentially result in bias and problems with interpretation. Using a counterfactual conceptualization of direct, indirect, and spillover effects, we provide a framework that can accommodate issues of mediation and spillover effects in group randomized trials. We show that the total effect can be decomposed into a natural direct effect, a within-classroom mediated effect, and a spillover mediated effect. We give identification conditions for each of the causal effects of interest and provide results on the consequences of ignoring “interference” or “spillover effects” when they are in fact present. Our modeling approach disentangles these effects. The analysis examines whether the 4Rs intervention has an effect on childrens’ depressive symptoms through changing the quality of other classes as well as through changing the quality of a childs own class. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Applied Developmental Science, Social Justice, and Socio-Political Well-Being

In this article we present a vision of applied developmental science (ADS) as a means of promoting social justice and socio-political well-being. This vision draws upon the fields significant accomplishments in identifying and strengthening developmental assets in marginalized youth communities, understanding the effects of poverty and racial discrimination on individual and family well-being and promoting positive development through youth civic engagement programs. It also highlights potential linkages between ADS and other social science fields working to identify and eliminate societal barriers to human development.

School-based strategies to prevent violence, trauma, and psychopathology: the challenges of going to scale.

Childrens trauma-related mental health problems are widespread, largely untreated and constitute significant barriers to academic achievement and attainment. Translational research has begun to identify school-based interventions to prevent violence, trauma and psychopathology. We describe in detail the findings to date on research evaluating one such intervention, the Reading, Writing, Respect, and Resolution (4Rs) Program. The 4Rs Program has led to modest positive impacts on both classrooms and children after 1 year that appear to cascade to more impacts in other domains of childrens development after 2 years. This research strives not only to translate research into practice but also translate practice into research. However, considerable challenges must be met for such research to inform prevention strategies at population scale.

Impacts of the CARE for Teachers program on teachers’ social and emotional competence and classroom interactions

Understanding teachers’ stress is of critical importance to address the challenges in today’s educational climate. Growing numbers of teachers are reporting high levels of occupational stress, and high levels of teacher turnover are having a negative impact on education quality. Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education (CARE for Teachers) is a mindfulness-based professional development program designed to promote teachers’ social and emotional competence and improve the quality of classroom interactions. The efficacy of the program was assessed using a cluster randomized trial design involving 36 urban elementary schools and 224 teachers. The CARE for Teachers program involved 30 hr of in-person training in addition to intersession phone coaching. At both pre- and postintervention, teachers completed self-report measures and assessments of their participating students. Teachers’ classrooms were observed and coded using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). Analyses showed that CARE for Teachers had statistically significant direct positive effects on adaptive emotion regulation, mindfulness, psychological distress, and time urgency. CARE for Teachers also had a statistically significant positive effect on the emotional support domain of the CLASS. The present findings indicate that CARE for Teachers is an effective professional development both for promoting teachers’ social and emotional competence and increasing the quality of their classroom interactions.

Assessing Invariance Across Sex and Race/Ethnicity in Measures of Youth Psychopathic Characteristics

The aim of this study was to assess the measurement invariance of 2 commonly used measures of youth psychopathic characteristics across sex and racial/ethnic groups. Among a community sample of Hispanic and Black adolescents (N = 355; 50.5% female; mean age = 15.09) and their parents, this study tested the configural and metric invariance of the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (LSRP; Levenson, Fitzpatrick, & Kiehl, 1995) and the parent-report version of the Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits (Frick, 2004). Preliminary analyses indicated that the adolescents in the present study reported similar rates of psychopathic characteristics as those reported by other studies of adolescents and young adults. Results of the multigroup invariance analyses indicated that these measures are invariant across sex and between Hispanic and Black youth. In addition, further analyses assessing associations between these measures and a number of behavioral and emotional characteristics indicated that scores on the LSRP Scale and Callous-Unemotional Traits demonstrate good convergent and discriminant validity with few differences by sex or race/ethnicity. To date, research on psychopathy has focused predominantly on samples of White males. Therefore, it is important that research examines the equivalence of measures of psychopathic characteristics across different populations, so that accurate assessments can be made to inform intervention and treatment efforts.

A Prospective, Longitudinal Examination of the Influence of Childhood Home and School Contexts on Psychopathic Characteristics in Adolescence

Much of the existing research examining etiological contributors to psychopathic characteristics considers only biological and physiological deficits, with little consideration given to contextual factors that may play a role in their development. This prospective, longitudinal study examined the influence of childhood home and school environments on adolescent psychopathic characteristics among 390 youth (50.5% female; 46.2% Black/African American, 44.9% Hispanic/Latino, 6.9% Asian or Native American/Alaska Native, and 2.1% Non-Hispanic White). Specifically, this study examined (1) the effect of home chaos and poor parental monitoring on adolescent primary and secondary psychopathy and callous-unemotional traits through the lens of multiple reporters, and (2) whether classroom climate quality across three years of childhood moderated these relationships. The results indicated that delinquency and home chaos in childhood were related to primary psychopathy in adolescence and that exposure to higher quality classroom climates across childhood acted as a buffer by mitigating the negative relationship between parental monitoring in childhood and secondary psychopathy in adolescence. These findings have implications for designing interventions to mitigate the manifestation of youth psychopathy.