Teacher depressive symptoms and children's school readiness in Ghana.

This study investigated associations between kindergarten teachers' (N = 208) depressive symptoms and students' (Ghanaian nationals, N = 1490, Mage  = 5.8) school-readiness skills (early literacy, early numeracy, social-emotional skills, and executive function) across 208 schools in Ghana over one school year. Teachers' depressive symptoms in the fall negatively predicted students' overall school-readiness skills in the spring, controlling for school-readiness skills in the fall. These results were primarily driven by social-emotional skills (r = .1-.3). There was evidence of heterogeneity by students' fall skill levels; teacher depressive symptoms predicted more negative spring overall school readiness for children who had higher fall school-readiness skills. Findings underscore the importance of teachers' mental health in early childhood education globally, with implications for policy and practice.

Medium-term protective effects of quality early childhood education during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to extended school closures globally. Access to remote learning opportunities during this time was vastly unequal within and across countries. Higher-quality early childhood education (ECE) can improve later academic outcomes, but longer-term effects during crises are unknown. This study provides the first experimental evidence of how previously attending a higher-quality ECE program affected child engagement in remote learning and academic scores during pandemic-related school closures in Ghana. Children (N = 1668; 50.1% male; Mage  = 10.1 years; all Ghanaian nationals) who attended higher-quality ECE at age 4 or 5 years had greater engagement in remote learning (d = .14) in October 2020, but not better language and literacy and math scores. Previous exposure to higher-quality ECE may support educational engagement during crises.

Children's learning and development in conflict- and crisis-affected countries: Building a science for action.

This paper critically reviews the opportunities and challenges in designing and conducting actionable research on the learning and development of children in conflict- and crisis-affected countries. We approached our review through two perspectives championed by Edward Zigler: (a) child development and social policy and (b) developmental psychopathology in context. The aim of the work was to answer the following questions: What works to enhance children's learning and development in such contexts? By what mechanisms? For whom? Under what conditions? How do experiences and conditions of crisis affect the basic processes of children's typical development? The review is based on a research-practice partnership started in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2010 and expanded to research in Niger and Lebanon in 2016. The focus of the research is on the impact of Healing Classrooms (a set of classroom practices) and Healing Classrooms Plus (an additional set of targeted social and emotional learning activities), developed by the International Rescue Committee, on children's academic outcomes and social and emotional learning. We sought to extract lessons from this decade of research for building a global developmental science for action. Special attention is paid to the importance of research-practice partnerships, conceptual frameworks, measurement and methodology. We conclude by highlighting several essential features of a global developmental science for action.

Using a Multi-level Framework to Test Empirical Relationships Among HIV/AIDS-Related Stigma, Health Service Barriers, and HIV Outcomes in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

HIV/AIDS-related (HAR) stigma is an ongoing problem in Sub-Saharan Africa that is thought to impede HIV preventive and treatment interventions. This paper uses a systematic sample of households (Level 1) nested within near-neighbor clusters (Level 2) and communities (Level 3) to examine multilevel relationships of HAR stigma to health service barriers (HSBs) and HIV outcomes in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, thereby addressing methodological and conceptual gaps in the literature from this context. Findings suggest differential patterns of prediction at Level 1 when examining two different dimensions of stigma: more highly stigmatizing attitudes predicted more household health service barriers; and perceptions of greater levels of community normative HAR stigma predicted higher household HIV ratios. Level 2 findings were similarly dimension-differentiated. Cross-level analyses found that near-neighbor cluster-level (setting level) consensus about (standard deviation) and level of (mean) community normative HAR stigma significantly predicted household-level HSBs and HIV ratio, controlling for household-level community normative HAR stigma. These differential patterns of prediction suggest that HAR stigma is a multi-level construct with multiple dimensions that relate to important outcomes differently within and across multiple ecological levels. This has important implications for future research, and for developing interventions that address setting-level variation in stigma.

Risk or resource: Does school climate moderate the influence of community violence on children's social-emotional development in the Democratic Republic of Congo?

Exposure to community violence is thought to create risk for the social and emotional development of children, including those children living in low-income, conflict-affected countries. In the absence of other types of community resources, schools may be one of the few community resources that can help buffer children from the negative effects of community violence exposure. We sampled 8,300 students ranging in age from 6-18 years in 123 schools from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to examine whether and how two distinct dimensions of positive school climate can protect two key features of children's social-emotional development in the presence of community violence. Multi-level models tested the hypothesis that students' perceptions of a positive school climate moderated the relation between community violence and self-reported mental health problems and peer victimization. Findings support the hypothesis. Specifically, a positive school climate protected against mental health problems and peer victimization in the presence of high community violence. Students who experienced high community violence and a negative school climate generally demonstrated the worst development. We find complex interactions between the dimensions of school climate and exposure to violence on student social-emotional development that highlight the salience of children's contexts for developmental studies in low-income countries. We use dynamic developmental systems theory and differential impact to discuss the dual potential of schools as a buffer against the effects of violence or as a source of compounded risk.

Longitudinal causal impacts of preschool teacher training on Ghanaian children's school readiness: Evidence for persistence and fade-out.

Preschool programs have expanded rapidly in low- and middle-income countries, but there are widespread concerns about whether they are of sufficient quality to promote children's learning and development. We conducted a large school-randomized control trial ('Quality Preschool for Ghana' - QP4G) of a one-year teacher training and coaching program, with and without parental-awareness meetings, designed to improve preschool quality and child development. We followed 3,435 children in 240 schools in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana, a country with universal pre-primary education. A previous study reported positive impacts of teacher training (but not teacher training plus parental-awareness meetings) at the end of the implementation year on some dimensions of classroom quality, teacher well-being, and children's school readiness (Wolf et al., [2019] Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 12, 10-37). The present study analyzed a new round of data collected 1 year after the end of implementation to assess (a) the extent of persistence in impacts on child development and (b) whether such impacts vary by select child, household, and school characteristics. We found impacts of the teacher training intervention on children's overall school readiness were sustained (d = 0.13), but were only marginally statistically significant. When broken down by domain, impacts on social-emotional skills specifically persisted. Persistent negative effects of teacher training plus parental-awareness meetings varied by the literacy status of the male parent such that negative impacts were concentrated in children in households with non-literate male heads.

The relationship between multidimensional economic well-being and children's mental health, physical health, and executive function development in South Africa.

Conceptualizing both economic well-being (EWB) and children's development as multidimensional constructs, the present study examines their association using bioecological developmental theory and structural equation modeling with Zulu children (ages 7-10) in KwaZulu-Natal, a highly impoverished region of South Africa (N = 1,958). Relative EWB within impoverished communities consists of three dimensions: material assets (durable goods and living environment), fiscal appraisal (subjective experiences of access to/allocation of resources), and fiscal capacity (monetary inflow/outflow). Children's development also is measured across multiple dimensions: physical health, mental health, and executive functioning. In addition to an overall association between EWB and children's development across outcomes, the sub-dimensions of EWB are differentially related to aspects of children's development. The dimension of material assets exhibits the greatest association with child outcomes, while fiscal capacity exhibits the least. Implications of these findings are discussed, including the use of multidimensional approaches to measuring EWB to understand, more clearly, its relationship to multiple dimensions of children's development. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcawZ6oOt-Q.

The Multilevel Relationships of HIV-Related Stigma to Child and Caregiver Mental Health among HIV-Affected Households in South Africa.

HIV/AIDS-related (HAR) stigma is still a prevalent problem in Sub-Saharan Africa, and has been found to be related to mental health of HIV-positive individuals. However, no studies in the Sub-Saharan African context have yet examined the relationship between HAR stigma and mental health among HIV-negative, HIV-affected adults and families; nor have any studies in this context yet examined stigma as an ecological construct predicting mental health outcomes through supra-individual (setting level) and individual levels of influence. Multilevel modeling was used to examine multilevel, ecological relationships between HAR stigma and mental health among child and caregiver pairs from a systematic, community-representative sample of 508 HIV-affected households nested within 24 communities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Two distinct dimensions of HAR stigma were measured: individual stigmatizing attitudes, and perceptions of community normative stigma. Findings suggest that individual-level HAR stigma significantly predicts individual mental health (depression and anxiety) among HIV-affected adults; and that community-level HAR stigma significantly predicts both individual-level mental health outcomes (anxiety) among HIV-affected adults, and mental health outcomes (PTSD and externalizing behavior scores) among HIV-affected children. Differentiated patterns of relationships were found using the two different stigma measures. These findings of unique relationships identified when utilizing two conceptually distinct stigma measures, at two levels of analysis (individual and community) suggest that HAR stigma in this context should be conceptualized as a multilevel, multidimensional construct. These findings have important implications both for mental health interventions and for interventions to reduce HAR stigma in this context.

Early Childhood Teachers' Lives in Context: Implications for Professional Development in Under-Resourced Areas.

This study explores the personal, professional, and contextual conditions faced by early childhood education (ECE) teachers in under-resourced settings and how these relate to teacher responsiveness to professional development (PD): namely, teacher attrition (a sign of PD failure when occurring shortly after PD), take-up of offered PD, adherence to PD training/materials, and quality of implementation. We use data from six disadvantaged districts in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana and PD focused on implementation of a national, play-based curriculum. Descriptive statistics indicate that ECE teachers (n = 302) face a multitude of barriers to high quality teaching across the bioecological model. Multilevel mixed effects models find that teachers with low job satisfaction are more likely to leave the school within the academic year. Teachers with moderate to severe depression are less likely to attend PD trainings. Senior teachers and those with poverty risks are less likely to adhere to PD material. Teachers with many time demand barriers are more likely to adhere to material. They also implement the content at higher observed quality as do teachers with bachelor's degrees and early childhood development (ECD) training. Take-up of PD also predicts quality of implementation. Practice and research implications are discussed.

Conducting longitudinal, process-oriented research with conflict-affected youth: Solving the inevitable challenges.

The reader might get the impression that the four projects described in this Special Section proceeded in a systematic and predictable way. Of course, those of us engaged in each research project encountered pitfalls and challenges along the way. A main goal of this Special Section is to provide pathways and encouragement for those who may be interested in advancing high-quality research on this topic. In this paper, we describe a set of practical and ethical challenges that we encountered in conducting our longitudinal, process-oriented, and translational research with conflict-affected youth, and we illustrate how problems can be solved with the goal of maintaining the internal and external validity of the research designs. We are hopeful that by describing the challenges of our work, and how we overcame them, which are seldom treated in this or any other literature on research on child development in high-risk contexts, we can offer a realistic and encouraging picture of conducting methodologically sound research in conflict-affected contexts.

Promoting children's learning and development in conflict-affected countries: Testing change process in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Improving children's learning and development in conflict-affected countries is critically important for breaking the intergenerational transmission of violence and poverty. Yet there is currently a stunning lack of rigorous evidence as to whether and how programs to improve learning and development in conflict-affected countries actually work to bolster children's academic learning and socioemotional development. This study tests a theory of change derived from the fields of developmental psychopathology and social ecology about how a school-based universal socioemotional learning program, the International Rescue Committee's Learning to Read in a Healing Classroom (LRHC), impacts children's learning and development. The study was implemented in three conflict-affected provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and employed a cluster-randomized waitlist control design to estimate impact. Using multilevel structural equation modeling techniques, we found support for the central pathways in the LRHC theory of change. Specifically, we found that LRHC differentially impacted dimensions of the quality of the school and classroom environment at the end of the first year of the intervention, and that in turn these dimensions of quality were differentially associated with child academic and socioemotional outcomes. Future implications and directions are discussed.

Impacts of Family Rewards on Adolescents' Mental Health and Problem Behavior: Understanding the Full Range of Effects of a Conditional Cash Transfer Program.

This paper examines the effects of Opportunity New York City-Family Rewards, the first holistic conditional cash transfer (CCT) program evaluated in the USA, on adolescents' mental health and problem behavior (key outcomes outside of the direct targets of the program) as well as on key potential mechanisms of these effects. The Family Rewards program, launched by the Center for Economic Opportunity in the Mayor's Office of the City of New York in 2007 and co-designed and evaluated by MDRC, offered cash assistance to low-income families to reduce economic hardship. The cash rewards were offered to families in three key areas: children's education, family preventive health care, and parents' employment. Results that rely on the random assignment design of the study find that Family Rewards resulted in statistically significant reductions in adolescent aggression and rates of substance use by program group adolescents as well as their friends, relative to adolescents in the control condition, but no statistically significant impacts on adolescent mental health. One possible mechanism for the benefits to adolescent behavior appears to be time spent with peers, as fewer adolescents in the program group spent time with friends and more adolescents in the program group spent time with family. Findings are discussed with regard to their implication for conditional cash transfer programs as well as for interventions targeting high-risk youth.

The Influence of Conduct Problems and Callous-Unemotional Traits on Academic Development Among Youth.

The present study attempted to address developmental differences within the large group of youth with conduct problems through an examination of the relationship between callous-unemotional traits and academic outcomes in an effort to expand the field's understanding of heterogeneity in outcomes associated with behavior problems. Data were collected from a cohort of 3rd grade students (N = 942; 51 % female; 45.6 % Hispanic/Latino, 41.1 % Black/African American, 4.7 % Non-Hispanic White; mean age = 8.07 years) in eighteen public elementary schools, as well as their parents and teachers. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that callous-unemotional traits were associated with lower quality student-teacher relationships and worse performance on standardized math and reading exams over and above the effects of conduct problems. These findings suggest that school-based interventions may be particularly effective in ameliorating some of the deficits noted within this subset of youth exhibiting conduct problems. This finding has important policy implications as the field of developmental science attempts to design and enrich programs that focus on improving social-emotional learning.

Organisational interventions for improving wellbeing and reducing work-related stress in teachers.

BACKGROUND: The teaching profession is an occupation with a high prevalence of work-related stress. This may lead to sustained physical and mental health problems in teachers. It can also negatively affect the health, wellbeing and educational attainment of children, and impose a financial burden on the public budget in terms of teacher turnover and sickness absence. Most evaluated interventions for the wellbeing of teachers are directed at the individual level, and so do not tackle the causes of stress in the workplace. Organisational-level interventions are a potential avenue in this regard. OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the effectiveness of organisational interventions for improving wellbeing and reducing work-related stress in teachers. SEARCH METHODS: We searched the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, ASSIA, AEI, BEI, BiblioMap, DARE, DER, ERIC, IBSS, SSCI, Sociological Abstracts, a number of specialist occupational health databases, and a number of trial registers and grey literature sources from the inception of each database until January 2015. SELECTION CRITERIA: Randomised controlled trials (RCTs), cluster-RCTs, and controlled before-and-after studies of organisational-level interventions for the wellbeing of teachers. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: We used standard methodological procedures expected by Cochrane. MAIN RESULTS: Four studies met the inclusion criteria. They were three cluster-randomised controlled trials and one with a stepped-wedge design.Changing task characteristicsOne study with 961 teachers in eight schools compared a task-based organisational change intervention along with stress management training to no intervention. It found a small reduction at 12 months in 10 out of 14 of the subscales in the Occupational Stress Inventory, with a mean difference (MD) varying from -3.84 to 0.13, and a small increase in the Work Ability Index (MD 2.27; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.64 to 2.90; 708 participants, low-quality evidence).Changing organisational characteristicsTwo studies compared teacher training combined with school-wide coaching support to no intervention. One study with 59 teachers in 43 schools found no significant effects on job-related anxiety (MD -0.25 95% CI -0.61 to 0.11, very low-quality evidence) or depression (MD -0.26 95% CI -0.57 to 0.05, very low-quality evidence) after 24 months. The other study with 77 teachers in 18 schools found no significant effects on the Maslach Burnout Inventory subscales (e.g. emotional exhaustion subscale: MD -0.05 95% CI -0.52 to 0.42, low-quality evidence) or the Teacher Perceived Emotional Ability subscales (e.g. regulating emotions subscale: MD 0.11 95% CI -0.11 to 0.33, low-quality evidence) after six months.Multi-component interventionOne study with 1102 teachers in 34 schools compared a multi-component intervention containing performance bonus, job promotion opportunities and mentoring support to a matched-comparison group consisting of 300 schools. It found moderately higher teacher retention rates (MD 11.50 95% CI 3.25 to 19.75 at 36 months follow-up, very low-quality evidence). However, the authors reported results only from one cohort out of four (eight schools), demonstrating a high risk of reporting bias. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: We found low-quality evidence that organisational interventions lead to improvements in teacher wellbeing and retention rates. We need further evaluation of the effects of organisational interventions for teacher wellbeing. These studies should follow a complex-interventions framework, use a cluster-randomised design and have large sample sizes.

Patterns of time use among low-income urban minority adolescents and associations with academic outcomes and problem behaviors.

Time budgets represent key opportunities for developmental support and contribute to an understanding of achievement gaps and adjustment across populations of youth. This study assessed the connection between out-of-school time use patterns and academic performance outcomes, academic motivations and goals, and problem behaviors for 504 low-income urban African American and Latino adolescents (54% female; M = 16.6 years). Time use patterns were measured across eight activity types using cluster analysis. Four groups of adolescents were identified, based on their different profiles of time use: (1) Academic: those with most time in academic activities; (2) Social: those with most time in social activities; (3) Maintenance/work: those with most time in maintenance and work activities; and (4) TV/computer: those with most time in TV or computer activities. Time use patterns were meaningfully associated with variation in outcomes in this population. Adolescents in the Academic cluster had the highest levels of adjustment across all domains; adolescents in the Social cluster had the lowest academic performance and highest problem behaviors; and adolescents in the TV/computer cluster had the lowest levels of intrinsic motivation. Females were more likely to be in the Academic cluster, and less likely to be in the other three clusters compared to males. No differences by race or gender were found in assessing the relationship between time use and outcomes. The study's results indicate that time use patterns are meaningfully associated with within-group variation in adjustment for low-income minority adolescents, and that shared contexts may shape time use more than individual differences in race/ethnicity for this population.

Item-level discordance in parent and adolescent reports of parenting behavior and its implications for adolescents' mental health and relationships with their parents.

The phenomenon of discordance between parents' and children's ratings of the child's mental health symptoms or of parenting behavior until recently has been treated as a problem of reliability. More recent work has sought to identify factors that may influence discordance, yet much remains to be learned about why informants' ratings of developmental phenomena are discordant and the meaning of such discordance. This study examined the extent to which discordance can be treated as a measure of the difference between two equally valid perceptions, and as such an indicator of the quality of the parent-adolescent relationship. One category of concordance and three patterns of discordance were derived from item-level differences in ratings of affection, control, and punitiveness provided by a diverse sample (53% female; 46% Hispanic-American, 35% African-American, 15% European-American, 4% another race/ethnicity) of 484 adolescents aged 12-20 years (M = 15.67, SD = 1.72) and their parents. Over and above adolescents' and parents' independent ratings of parenting, the discordance between these ratings was found to predict adolescent reports of anxiety and conduct disorder symptoms, as well as the quality of the parent-adolescent relationship. This was particularly true when adolescents and parents were discordant in their ratings of affection and when adolescents rated their parents higher on affection than did parents themselves. Implications of these findings and future research directions are discussed.

Low Income Families' Utilization of the Federal "Safety Net": Individual and State-Level Predictors of TANF and Food Stamp Receipt.

Two of the primary programs through which the federal government provides benefits to low income families are the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program and the Food Stamp program. However, many eligible low income families do not actually receive these benefits. We combined state-level policy data with rich data on a national sample of low income families to investigate family and state-level predictors of TANF and Food Stamp receipt. Our findings indicate: 1) families experiencing more economic hardship and health challenges are more likely to receive benefits, and 2) states' coverage is associated with families' receipt of TANF, but not Food Stamps. Implications for policy and research are discussed.

Cross-national measurement of school learning environments: Creating indicators for evaluating UNICEF's Child Friendly Schools Initiative.

The present study examines the psychometric properties of a student-reported measure of school quality, the CFS Conditions for Learning Survey, to examine its utility as a cross-national comparative measure to evaluate UNICEF's Child Friendly Schools initiative. Factor analyses conducted on data from fifth- and sixth- grade students in 68 schools across the Philippines, Nicaragua, and South Africa revealed a core set of items that loaded highly onto each of the three dimensions of the CFS Conditions for Learning survey across all three countries. Formal tests established measurement invariance for a subset of these items, indicating that they were free from methodological bias across countries. However, meaningful differences in the country-specific structure and substantive interpretation of school quality were also detected. The results suggest that items in the CFS Conditions for Learning survey can be used to create both reliable cross-national and country-specific indicators of school quality and provide a blueprint for future psychometric work in the field of comparative child and family policy.