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Tom Kratochwill

April 2009

Recent developments in social and emotional learning (SEL) have pointed to the reciprocal relations between children’s academic functioning and their socio-emotional health. Professional literature in this field points to the need for including students’ academic skills and competencies as part of mental health intervention research.

University of Wisconsin-Madison psychologist and professor Thomas R. Kratochwill says educators cannot afford to continue offering mental health services for K-12 students in isolation. These services need to be reframed, mainstreamed, and folded into schools’ broader academic mission.

The good news is that schools already have resources, supports, and opportunities that may provide entry points for delivery of expanded mental health services. Virtually all elementary and secondary schools in the U.S. have school psychologists and provide mental health services, Kratochwill says. The bad news is that the proportion of students needing services continues to outpace supply, and mental health services often remain separate from academic programs. Knowledge about mental health programs and educational achievement have developed in isolation from each other.

To identify research directions for future studies of school-based mental health services, Tom Kratochwill and colleagues reviewed scholarly literature to identify evidence- based interventions that target a combination of students’ academic-educational functioning and their mental health functioning.

They studied 2000 articles published between 1990 and 2006; only 64 studies met the methodological criteria for inclusion in this review. Of those 64 studies, 24 tested the effects of a program on both academic and mental health outcomes, while 40 examined mental health outcomes only.

Schools are increasingly held accountable for achieving academic outcomes. Given that, Kratochwill says he was surprised that most of the mental health studies did not include academically relevant outcomes. That means that the impact of school-based mental health interventions on educationally relevant behaviors is under researched and may be poorly understood.

Many children receive mental health services in school settings. Although studies of social and emotional learning have linked social and academic competence, the impacts of mental health interventions on academics, and of academic interventions on mental health, are understudied.

Kratochwill argues for a multi-tiered intervention approach in schools. Varying levels of service intensity are available over time and in different grades for students, especially during transitional periods.

Because schools and districts have tight budgets, it’s important to know which students might benefit most from different types of intervention. And to streamline or adapt effective interventions for dissemination on a larger scale, it’s important to understand how various interventions produce positive outcomes.

Kratochwill says the relatively few studies that did target both academics and mental health focused mainly on younger children and on those with externalizing behavior problems. Few of the published studies examined children in middle or high school settings, nor did they include children with internalizing behavior problems including anxiety and depression.

School mental health research would be significantly strengthened by more carefully designed studies of the effects of specific intervention components and by the optimal timing for their delivery, Kratochwill says. They also would enable findings from this work to have more policy and practice relevance.