Browsing by Author "Baer, Lee"
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Item Evidence for the Effectiveness of a National School-Based Mental Health Program in Chile(2015) Guzmán Piña, Javier; Kessler, Ronald C.; Squicciarini, Ana María; George, Myriam; Baer, Lee; Canenguez, Katia M.; Abel, Madelaine R.; McCarthy, Alyssa E.; Jellinek, Michael S.; Murphy, J. MichaelObjective Skills for Life (SFL) is the largest school-based mental health program in the world, screening and providing services to more than 1,000,000 students in Chile over the past decade. This is the first external evaluation of the program. Method Of the 8,372 primary schools in Chile in 2010 that received public funding, one-fifth (1,637) elected to participate in SFL. Each year, all first- and third-grade students in these schools are screened with validated teacher- and parent-completed measures of psychosocial functioning (the Teacher Observation of Classroom Adaptation–Re-Revised [TOCA-RR] and the Pediatric Symptom Checklist–Chile [PSC-CL]). Students identified as being at risk on the TOCA-RR in first grade are referred to a standardized 10-session preventive intervention in second grade. This article explores the relationships between workshop participation and changes in TOCA-RR and PSC-CL scores, attendance, and promotion from third to fourth grades. Results In all, 16.4% of students were identified as being at-risk on the TOCA-RR. Statistically significant relationships were found between the number of workshop sessions attended and improvements in behavioral and academic outcomes after controlling for nonrandom selection into exposure and loss to follow-up. Effect sizes for the difference between attending most (7–10) versus fewer (0–6) sessions ranged from 0.08 to 0.16 standard deviations. Conclusion This study provides empirical evidence that a large-scale mental health intervention early in schooling is significantly associated with improved behavioral and academic outcomes. Future research is needed to implement more rigorous experimental evaluation of the program, to examine longer-term effects, and to investigate possible predictors of heterogeneity of treatment responseItem Mental Health Predicts Better Academic Outcomes: A Longitudinal Study of Elementary School Students in Chile(2015) Murphy, J. Michael; Guzmán Piña, Javier; McCarthy, Alyssa E.; Squicciarini, Ana María; George, Myriam; Canenguez, Katia M.; Dunn, Erin C.; Baer, Lee; Simonsohn, ArielaThe world’s largest school-based mental health program, Habilidades para la Vida [Skills for Life (SFL)], has been operating on a national scale in Chile for 15 years. SFL’s activities include using standardized measures to screen elementary school students and providing preventive workshops to students at risk for mental health problems. This paper used SFL’s data on 37,397 students who were in first grade in 2009 and third grade in 2011 to ascertain whether first grade mental health predicted subsequent academic achievement and whether remission of mental health problems predicted improved academic outcomes. Results showed that mental health was a significant predictor of future academic performance and that, overall, students whose mental health improved between first and third grade made better academic progress than students whose mental health did not improve or worsened. Our findings suggest that school-based mental health programs like SFL may help improve students’ academic outcomes.