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The last few years have been filled with online video calls for things like work meetings, doctor’s appointments, virtual classrooms and to catch up with friends.  

As schools and communities scramble to find more ways to support the well-being of youth amid a pandemic-fueled mental health crisis, some think part of the answer lies with students helping other students.  

Dive Brief:

The 2020-21 school year had the highest number of school shooting casualties in the past two decades — despite the pandemic keeping many students off campus in remote learning for portions of the year, according to a school crime and safety report released Tuesday by the National Center for Education Statistics.

The combination of 43 school shootings with deaths and 50 school shootings with injuries in public and private schools was the highest annual figure recorded since the 2000-01 school year, when the data collection began. Crime and safety incidents, however, became less prevalent between 2009 and 2020 with decreased rates of nonfatal criminal victimization, such as theft, and less bullying, student sexual harassment and student harassment of peers based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

The report, published annually, includes findings from 23 indicators on school crime and safety, including preventative measures. The findings, the 31-page report said, can help inform policy makers and education professionals as they seek solutions to threatening and dangerous school-based activity.
 

We are proud to announce the new Call for Research published by Pearson Clinical Assessment. Our goal is to ensure that Pearson assessments comply with the highest standards of quality and support research that investigates the validity or efficacy of our products. We are inviting United States-based faculty members, graduate students, and qualified researchers to submit their proposals no later than September 16, 2022.

Here’s what you need to know...

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

Children growing up in more disadvantaged neighborhoods – meaning those with poor housing quality, more poverty and lower levels of employment and education – show observable increases in brain activity when viewing emotional faces on a screen, according to our team’s new study. But importantly, we found that this association was true only when the adults in those neighborhoods also did not have strong shared norms about preventing crime and violence.  

When Elizabeth Brown took over as principal following a 2018 school shooting at Florida's Forest High School, she thought her community had made plenty of progress in its recovery: The room where the shooting took place had been repurposed, parents seemed to trust her with the school safety plan, and Brown had gotten the hang of working around students' trigger points.

A large-scale study of U.S. children and adolescents has found that participation in a team sport is associated with fewer mental health difficulties, but that kids who are exclusively involved in an individual sport—such as tennis or wrestling—may face greater mental health difficulties than kids who do no sports at all. Matt Hoffmann of California State University, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on June 1, 2022.  

Dive Brief:

Almost a third of students who considered visiting a school counselor, school-based therapist or school psychologist about issues outside of career services said they ended up not doing so because they didn't think their issues "were big enough to bother someone with" or felt like they would be judged, according to a nationally representative survey from Springtide Research Institute.