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.

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.

School-based strategies to prevent violence, trauma, and psychopathology: the challenges of going to scale.

Children's trauma-related mental health problems are widespread, largely untreated and constitute significant barriers to academic achievement and attainment. Translational research has begun to identify school-based interventions to prevent violence, trauma and psychopathology. We describe in detail the findings to date on research evaluating one such intervention, the Reading, Writing, Respect, and Resolution (4Rs) Program. The 4Rs Program has led to modest positive impacts on both classrooms and children after 1 year that appear to cascade to more impacts in other domains of children's development after 2 years. This research strives not only to translate research into practice but also translate practice into research. However, considerable challenges must be met for such research to inform prevention strategies at population scale.