Teachers survive together: Teacher collegial relationships and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 disrupted the ecology of schools and negatively influenced teacher mental health and retention. This mixed-methods study investigates the relationship between teacher well-being and teacher collegial relationships after a year enduring COVID-19 pandemic disruptions. By analyzing data collected through surveys ( = 185) and interviews ( = 27) with U.

Examining teacher approaches to implementation of a classwide SEL program.

Scale-up of universal social-emotional learning (SEL) programs has become a priority in schools to promote positive social outcomes for all students. Although studies have examined student outcomes associated with school-based SEL when extensive training and support are provided, research on teacher SEL implementation practices under typical conditions has received far less attention. As such, this study examined the first-year universal SEL implementation practices of 41 teachers across 13 schools in three states.

A General Bayesian Multidimensional Item Response Theory Model for Small and Large Samples.

Although item response theory (IRT) models such as the bifactor, two-tier, and between-item-dimensionality IRT models have been devised to confirm complex dimensional structures in educational and psychological data, they can be challenging to use in practice. The reason is that these models are multidimensional IRT (MIRT) models and thus are highly parameterized, making them only suitable for data provided by large samples. Unfortunately, many educational and psychological studies are conducted on a small scale, leaving the researchers without the necessary MIRT models to confirm the hypothesized structures in their data.

Navigating into, through, and beyond the middle grades: the role of middle grades attendance in staying on track for high school graduation.

In this longitudinal study, we investigated the use of attendance during middle school as a behavioral indicator of engagement to predict whether students are on track toward high school graduation. We used administrative data from four cohorts of students in New York City schools (N=303,845) to (a) explore patterns of change in attendance between Grades 4 and 8 and (b) determine the extent to which changes in attendance between Grades 4 and 8 predict which students are on track in Grade 9 for going on to graduate from high school. Results of latent growth modeling indicated that students demonstrate the most substantial declines in attendance during Grade 8 and that attendance changes are most variable in this year, with some students demonstrating much more dramatic declines than others.

Assessing influences on intervention implementation: revision of the usage rating profile-intervention.

Although treatment acceptability was originally proposed as a critical factor in determining the likelihood that a treatment will be used with integrity, more contemporary findings suggest that whether something is likely to be adopted into routine practice is dependent on the complex interplay among a number of different factors. The Usage Rating Profile-Intervention (URP-I; Chafouleas, Briesch, Riley-Tillman, & McCoach, 2009) was recently developed to assess these additional factors, conceptualized as potentially contributing to the quality of intervention use and maintenance over time. The purpose of the current study was to improve upon the URP-I by expanding and strengthening each of the original four subscales.