Helping Students with Behavioral Disorders

Education in America is at a crossroads. Lehigh's commitment to innovative research and focus on applying research to practice allow College of Education faculty to help shape education and mental-health policy across the nation.

Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, South Carolina

To give high school kids with severe behavioral problems a better shot at graduation and a career, Professor Lee Kern developed the National Research and Development Center on Serious Behavior Disorders at the Secondary Level. As the five-year project ends, Kern and her fellow researchers are assessing data to determine what worked best.

“So far, several interventions look powerful, such as mentoring, so we are looking at how we can enhance that and identify predictors of good relationships between mentors and mentees,” Kern says.
 
The researchers also are examining mental health interventions.

“We got a lot of really comprehensive demographic data, including what kinds of school and mental health services students receive, where and at what age they received them, and the link between the severity of their behavioral problems and the types of services provided,” she says.

The researchers already have identified factors that figure into who gets services, including ethnicity and school location.
 
They also are looking into school special education labels.  "There were students in our study who exhibited identical behaviors. Some get a special education diagnosis and others do not,”  she says. “We want to find out why.”

The team will make recommendations to the U.S. Department of Education, which supported the project with a $10.4 million grant.