A community response approach to mental health and substance abuse crises reduced crime.

Police officers often serve as first responders to mental health and substance abuse crises. Concerns over the unintended consequences and high costs associated with this approach have motivated emergency response models that augment or completely remove police involvement. However, there is little causal evidence evaluating these programs.

Reappraising academic and social adversity improves middle school students' academic achievement, behavior, and well-being.

The period of early adolescence is characterized by dramatic changes, simultaneously affecting physiological, psychological, social, and cognitive development. The physical transition from elementary to middle school can exacerbate the stress and adversity experienced during this critical life stage. Middle school students often struggle to find social and emotional support, and many students experience a decreased sense of belonging in school, diverting students from promising academic and career trajectories.

Assessing malleable social-psychological academic attitudes in early adolescence.

Although it is important to accurately assess and promote student achievement, it is also critical to accurately assess and promote student social and emotional well-being and positive attitudes about school. Recent research has shown the promise of school-based interventions to improve certain student academic attitudes but has also raised concerns about a lack of reliable measures of these attitudes for early adolescents. We compiled the Malleable Social-Psychological Academic Attitudes (MSPAA) survey to measure school trust, social belonging, evaluation anxiety, self-complexity, locus of control, and identification with school.