By Office of the Vice-President (Research)

There is a growing body of evidence describing the critical role that social, emotional, and character skills and related interventions play in children’s mental health, behavioral, and academic success. However, those working with children in schools and other contexts are confronted with a large, sometimes confusing array of terms, definitions, and approaches.

In this presentation Dr. Jones will review research on the nature, content, and efficacy of social and emotional learning as well as character-focused strategies and programs designed for early and middle childhood. She will describe new translational work designed to build connections between the major conceptual and practice-focused frameworks for the field, summarize a number of tensions in this area, and discuss the opportunities they present for future research and practice.

Dr. Stephanie Jones is a professor of Education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Her research, anchored in prevention science, focuses on the effects of poverty and exposure to violence on children and youth’s social, emotional, and behavioural development. Over the last ten years her work has focused on both evaluation research addressing the impact of preschool and elementary focused social-emotional learning interventions on behavioural and academic outcomes and classroom practices; as well as new curriculum development, implementation, and testing.