Scan any major news sources that cater to the general public and you will find topics related to education are very much on the front burner. The topic might be charter schools, discipline policies, accountability for academic gaps among different groups of students, Common Core curricular standards or teacher quality, just to name a few. The APA Center for Psychology in Schools and Education (CPSE) is working to ensure that the public looks to psychology for research, policy recommendations and practical suggestions that address these and other topics.
One way CPSE reflects the pulse of psychology in the public domain is by staffing the Coalition for Psychology in Schools and Education. This group, which is composed of 15 APA divisions and seven affiliated groups, serves as an incubator for ideas that are developed for and with the education community. The coalition's central activity since 2012 has been the development of the Top Twenty Principles from Psychology for PreK–12 Teaching and Learning. This project began as a thought experiment. Each coalition member was asked to come up with two must-have principles from psychology that would be most helpful to teachers. Over the course of a few sessions, outside reviews and comparisons with other key documents, the group agreed on 20 principles. The document, which was released in March, includes a description of each principle and suggestions for classroom application. We expect the document to be widely circulated to policymakers, teacher preparation programs and schools. Read it online.
The coalition has also been developing a set of modules for school personnel to improve team approaches. Teams are instrumental for addressing complex issues related to academic content, the needs of exceptional students, concerns about child and adolescent development, and discipline problems. Effective teams can be efficient and empowering, but poor communication and structural issues can impede this work. As a free resource for teachers and other interested parties, five TEAMTeach modules will focus on effective team functioning. These modules will be unveiled at APA's 2015 Annual Convention, Aug. 6–9, and join existing products on the APA website, including those on new teacher stress, addressing violence directed against teachers and managing disruptive students, among others.
As a service to schools, CPSE staff work with a Board of Educational Affairs-appointed committee to award the annual Golden Psi award to a school that exemplifies the application of psychology to academic growth and social emotional health. The winning school is presented $1,000 and a commemorative plaque at a school assembly. This year's winner is Galileo School for Gifted Learning, serving grades K–6 in Sanford, Florida.
CPSE's work also includes an exciting new effort to focus on young children. By year's end, the coalition will introduce a brochure to guide parents in selecting a child-care center. Also, CPSE will survey 10,000 kindergarten teachers on their views of the cognitive and affective skills they see in their students. The survey results will be compared to a parallel study conducted in the 1990s to investigate what issues remain consistent and what is newly central to the role of early education teachers, especially now that preschool is becoming more prevalent and accessible to a wider range of families.
Finally, CPSE staff and the Board of Scientific Affairs Chair Frank Worrell, PhD, were awarded funds from the American Psychological Foundation to support a Coalition for the Psychology of High Performance. So far, eight APA divisions (3, 7, 10, 14, 16, 17, 19 and 47) have joined this effort to develop evidence-based materials on how high performance in youth is manifested, studied, measured and discussed in psychology; how psychology contributes to high performance; and what generalizable psychological principles can be applied across domains of talent.
The Center for Psychology in Schools and Education exemplifies the application of psychological science to daily living. Next time you see education in the headlines, think about how APA contributes to bolstering the role of psychological science in high-quality education.
