Georgia Educational Research Association Conference

Longitudinal Academic Trajectory of Students at Behavioral and Emotional Risk

Depression, anxiety, and stress are common mental problems among adolescents. Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies have found that students who suffer from mental health problems (e.g., ADHD, anxiety, or depression) tend to show school problems and social problems. Thus, it is an urgent issue to identify and help children with mental health problems, so as to improving their lives in many aspects. Unfortunately, research shows that the significant rate of children who suffers from the behavioral or emotional problem is unidentified because of their mild symptoms. As a result, their unnoticed subtle symptoms continue to develop gradually and become mental illnesses eventually. When the mild symptoms become the noticeable mental illness, the treatments get more challenging and take longer time than as in the early stage. The early detection of children’s mental health problems can help them to improve academic outcomes and prevent the further development of mental health problems at their adulthoods. The early detection of children who are at behavioral or emotional problems is possible through the universal mental health screening in schools. The present study focused on the Behavioral and Emotional Screening System (BESS; Kamphaus & Reynolds, 2007) to examine the longitudinal positive effect of the early stage detection influencing students’ academic growth by revealing trajectories over a four-year period. The research questions are: (1) How many trajectories describe students’ academic performance over a four year period? (2) Do the BESS mental health screening influence on trajectories of students’ academic performance? (3) What are the other factors to explain trajectories of academic performance?