He/she may not use the publisher’s version, that is posted on SpringerLink and similar Springer websites, for the purpose of selfarchiving or deposit. Therefore the final publication is available at link.springer.com. Articles disseminated via link.springer.com are indexed, abstracted and referenced by many abstracting and information services, bibliographic networks, subscription agencies, library networks, and consortia. Author is requested to use the appropriate DOI for the article. Lots of school age children suffer from undiagnosed mental health problems, and this problem disproportionately affects Latino/an and similar minority children, and those living in lowincome neighborhoods.
Service gaps exist for youth in lowincome urban areas, recent metaanalyses have shown these to be effective.
Besides, the authors of this study wanted to determine the efficacy of this program. Turn 2 Us is an elementary school based mental health promotion and prevention program in NY aimed at providing services to students, staff, and parents, and has multiple tracks of intervention to it’s not possible to tell if it was the customized activities, collaboration between teachers, parents, and community, or classroom climate that led to the improvements in these students’ outcomes.
Students involved in this study demonstrated significant improvements in classroom behavior, social performance, standardized test scores and attendance. Basically, it was apparent that generating a strong partnership with key stakeholders from the community, actually the school administration, fostered the necessary support and infrastructure needed to effectively implement services in the school. Basically, That’s a fact, it’s also possible that the mechanism through which students change is different for students with different kinds of problems types. So authors note that the program had greater impact on those students at highest risk for either internalizing or externalizing problems…given that a recent meta analysis…found that programs were typically more effective at addressing the needs of students with internalizing rather than externalizing problems.
I am sure that the authors note that while this study gives support to other research on the efficacy of programs for low income, minority youth, larger sample sizes with a matched control group are necessary in case you are going to better judge the impact of this particular intervention.
Control attendance and exam scores were collected from ‘non participants’ in identical school equaling the general number of students participating in the study.
Academic achievement were assessed by using English language arts and mathematics state exams, and attendance reports from the school. So this was used as a baseline measure of risk for mental health problems after students enrolled in the program, Teachers were asked to assess students on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Now this measure was developed by the researchers and is on the basis of the Teacher Report Form, Teachers were asked to complete a Student Assessment Survey to track social and behavioral functioning in class.
It contains 25 items with five subscales encompassing.
The researchers recruited 182 of 186 students in third through fifth grades who were involved in the Turn 2 Us program and thirty two of their teachers to participate in the study.
Fifty one students percent were male, 49 were female, and 94percentage completed all measures. Attrition in this group led to a final sample size of 174 students. Eighty seven students percent were Latino, 10percentage identified as African American, and 3percent identified as some other race or ethnicity. Students from most of the population were also allowed to join these activities with an eye to prevent stigmatizing the group of children receiving services, and while these students were not given the mentoring intervention, they have been invited to participate in the study to serve as a comparison group. Children with externalizing behaviors were offered the opportunity to partake in sports/dance activities after school, and those with internalizing behaviors were invited to join an art/drama activity, All students in the program participated in a 12 week mentoring intervention as a group during recess with children from their respective track.