Staying on Track in School: Religious Influences in High- and Low-Risk Settings

Religious communities are known to instill standards of achievement in their young people, but this observation may not apply as well to disadvantaged youth and their culture. In this study, we explore whether religious involvement enables youth in low-income neighborhoods to stay on track in school, rather than falling behind. Using data from two waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find that adolescents in low-income neighborhoods do not differ in their church attendance patterns from their peers in higher-income areas. However, their religious involvement is more likely to contribute to their academic progress than it is among youth in higher-income neighborhoods, even with adjustments for key risk and protective factors. This cross-level interaction involving youth church attendance shows a consistent relationship with several other measures of neighborhood disadvantage. We explore explanations for church attendance's uniquely positive effect in impoverished neighborhoods and its broader implications.     

Challenges and opportunities in moving toward a public health approach in school mental health

These three outstanding papers are important for the discipline of school psychology, the field of school-based mental health, and more generally for systems of education and mental health for children and adolescents. As the authors emphasize, there is an unprecedented focus on improving programs that remove barriers to learning and enhance development, health, and mental health in youth, in the most universal natural setting—the schools. The authors also correctly highlight that school psychology is uniquely positioned to play a leading role in this reform and change effort. Two interconnected themes of the public health approach—applying the evidence base and moving toward preventive and population-focused interventions—are emphasized in these papers, and while they focus on school psychology, the issues discussed are generalizable to the many disciplines that operate within educational and mental health systems. In the following discussion, I react to the papers' two major themes, discuss realities that should be addressed for progress to be made, and comment on their implications for school psychology.     

PEIRCEAN APPROACHES TO EMERGENT SYSTEMS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Cognitive science and religion provides perspectives on human cognition and spirituality. Emergent systems theory captures the subatomic, physical, biological, psychological, cultural, and transcendent relationships that constitute the human person. C. S. Peirce's metaphysical categories and existential graphs enrich traditional cognitive science modeling tools to capture emergent phenomena. From this richer perspective, one can reinterpret the traditional doctrine of soul as form of the body in terms of information as the constellation of constitutive relationships that enables real possibility.