Affiliation provides mental health services for families and hands-on training for students
This summer we at the Institute for Translational Research in Children’s Mental Health (ITR) announced an exciting affiliation between ITR, the University of Minnesota and the Family Innovations Counseling and Training Center.
In its first half-year the clinic has provided hundreds of hours of service based on evidence-based interventions to Twin Cities families. Through our affiliation, the clinic has also provided hands-on training for students preparing for a career in mental health, helping reach our goals of translating discoveries in children’s mental health research into practice and providing training in evidence-based practices that students often have difficulty finding for their practicum experience.
The clinic leases space within ITR’s office building located near downtown Minneapolis, offering convenient access to the families it serves. It is one of 11 Family Innovations outpatient clinics in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
J.B. Mayo, associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, received the Josie R. Johnson Human Rights and Social Justice Award at the University of Minnesota Equity and Diversity Breakfast on Nov. 17.
The Josie R. Johnson Award was established in honor of Dr. Josie R. Johnson in recognition of her lifelong contributions to human rights and social justice, which guided her work with the civil rights movement, years of community service, and tenure at the University. The award honors University faculty, staff, and students who, through their principles and practices, exemplify Dr. Johnson’s standard of excellence in creating respectful and inclusive living, learning, and working environments.
Mayo was recognized for his dedication to equity and social justice in schools. Colleagues noted, in particular, his scholarship and outreach related to LGBTQ youth and teachers and his support for LGBTQ communities of color in school and community settings. Read more about Dr. Mayo.
FSOS professors Abi Gewirtz and Bill Doherty offered post-election thoughts in local and national media outlets, respectively.
Local NBC affiliate, KARE 11 featured Abi Gewirtz and her thoughts on talking to kids regarding the current mood in the country.
The Wall Street Journal featured Bill Doherty and his thoughts on moving forward in familial relationships when parties disagree on the outcome of the election. Independent.co.uk also featured Doherty’s thoughts.
CEHD researchers Jason Wolff and Jed Elison are detecting objective differences in the brains of children who have autism spectrum disorders as early as six months old. And their work is contributing to a national effort to understand this complex array of developmental disorders.
“We know from intervention studies that the earlier you intervene, the better the outcome,” says Wolff in a U of M Medical Bulletin feature story.
Read more about the work of several U of M researchers who bring a spectrum of expertise to their autism research, including prevalence studies led by Amy Hewitt, director of CEHD’s Research and Training Center on Community Living in the Institute on Community Integration.
Close to 200 children’s mental health researchers and practitioners experienced an enlightening and inspiring three days at the fall symposium, “Moving Toward Precision Healthcare in Children’s Mental Health.” National experts in the emerging field of precision healthcare shared findings and perspectives about the growing body of research showing the effectiveness of highly personalized treatments.
Precision health care addresses the question, “What type of intervention design works best for whom? And why or how does it work to benefit individuals?” It draws from disciplines including pharmacogenetics, neuroscience, epigenetics, intervention science, research methodologies, and mobile technologies. Tailoring technologies can include things like smartphone apps, social media, wearables, and other unique delivery systems.
The approach has the potential to overcome barriers for families of varying economic and social circumstances who are addressing mental and behavioral health issues, including substance use disorders.
Articles from the conference will be published in a special edition of the Prevention Science Journal. In the meantime, slides from the presenters can be viewed on the event page.
The annual symposium is hosted by the Institute for Translational Research in Children’s Mental Health. It’s one of the ways the institute is bridging the vast gap between research and practice. A 2017 colloquia series will be announced soon.
Over 175,000 migrants arrived in Sweden last year alone.
The influx of refugees has posed challenges for local European schools. Educators and administrators are working to find solutions for the shortage of teachers. In addition, they must find ways to overcome language and cultural barriers for these students.
A group of 20 administrators from Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom met with officials in Washington D.C. to develop two project groups in Minnesota and Colorado to better aid national refugee resettlement.
Currently, LEAP High School in St. Paul has been serving immigrant and refugee students for the past two decades.
The dialogue continued at panel last Monday. Local administrators from Hopkins, Maplewood and St. Paul gathered to discuss strategies, one of which being a buddy program for subject matter specialists and non-native English speaking teachers to work together and pull from each others strengths.
Marina Aleixo, the International Programs Coordinator at the College of Education and Human Development was involved in the conversation. Aleixo is also assisting in a “Teach Your Former Language” project in London geared to shift attitudes towards refugees.
Dr. Aleixo leads the Global Teacher Education Program, and has hosted more than 250 preservice and inservice teachers over the past four years. Her current work in the office of International Initiatives involves development of international programs for educators and students.
“Even though they are all from European countries, they have very, very different approaches to how they deal with refugee and immigrant student,” Aleixo said to the Star Tribune.
The State Department is planning a follow-up workshop on refugees in the education system in France next January.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity to continue the conversation,” Aleixo said to the Star Tribune.
When I taught reading and writing to sixth grade students at the California School for the Deaf in Fremont, CA, I began to notice a pattern that supported research I had previously read. My students who had parents who were deaf or hearing parents who signed fluently in American Sign Language (ASL) typically read on or above grade level, while those whose families had not signed with them from birth typically lagged behind. This observation made me want to investigate how we might better improve literacy development in young deaf children. Both my research and classroom experience supports an increasing body of research that indicates we can improve outcomes in deaf education through a visual-learning based approach.
The Institute for Translational Research in Children’s Mental Health (ITR) hosted their second annual symposium October 5-7, 2016 at the University of Minnesota.
Moving Toward Precision Healthcare in Children’s Mental Health: New Perspectives, Methodologies, and Technologies in Therapeutics and Prevention featured national experts in the field of personalized, precision-based treatment discussing cutting edge research and practice in the field.
Find speaker bios and presentation slides at the ITR event website.
This year marks major anniversaries for three of TRIO’s best-known programs’ arrival in Minnesota—50 years of Upward Bound, 40 years of Student Support Services, and 25 years of McNair Scholars. On September 22, TRIO celebrated these Minnesota milestones with a gala held at TCF Bank Stadium, where 400 gathered to honor TRIO’s dedication to equity in higher education access with awards, entertainment, and stories from TRIO staff, students, and alumni.
Those recognized with awards included TRIO Achievers Joyce M. Bell, Courtney Bell, Maisue Xiong Thao, and Lois Vosika-Weir, all alumnae of U of M TRIO programs. Program leaders Bruce and Sharyn Schelske, who served the University for more than 40 years, were honored with the TRIO Legacy Award, and Congressman Keith Ellison received the TRIO Champion Award for his efforts to increase program funding at state and national levels.
Read more about the TRIO milestones on the Vision 2020 Blog.
Department of Family Social Science faculty members Cathy Solheim and Liz Wieling, along with FSOS Ph.D. student Jaime Ballard, recently published a breakthrough textbook titled, Immigrant and Refugee Families: Global Perspectives on Displacement and Resettlement Experiences.
While they were preparing to teach “Global Perspectives on Immigrant and Refugee Families,” Solheim and Wieling noticed that while there was a wealth of information regarding the immigrant experiences of individuals, very few textbooks focused on immigration experiences as it pertained to the family as a whole.
With the help of Ballard, Solheim and Wieling created a text that discusses current theoretical frameworks and synthesizes current research specific to immigrant and refugee families.
Potential health benefits of yoga were revealed in a pilot study of African American women by Daheia Barr-Anderson, assistant professor in CEHD’s School of Kinesiology.
African American women, as a demographic group, have serious health issues, according to Barr-Anderson. “Over 80 percent of us are overweight,” she said. “African American women have high rates of diabetes and 40 percent of African American women are hypertensive.”
Barr-Anderson, a certified yoga instructor, is introducing more African American women to yoga because of its potential to improve health outcomes, and she is studying the results.
This three-month study took several baseline measures of health in 59 African American women and divided them into an intervention group of 30 and control group of 29. The intervention group attended multiple yoga classes each week for three months; the control group did not.
The data is still being analyzed, but Barr-Anderson is “confident that we will see that yoga helped our participants enact some very powerful changes in their physical and mental health.” She noted that some of the most committed participants showed significant changes, including weight loss and improved blood pressure.
Read more about the study in Barr-Anderson’s Improving Lives blog post.
The Institute for Translational Research in Children’s Mental Health (ITR) announced the funding of a new national center to raise awareness of, and increase access to, family interventions that promote resilience in traumatized children.
The Center for Resilient Families, funded with a $3 million grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, is a partnership between Ambit Network at the University of Minnesota (PI, Dr. Abigail Gewirtz), developers of evidence-based family programs at Arizona State University’s REACH Institute, Implementation Sciences International, and the Research Consortium on Gender-based Violence.
Over the next five years, the Center for Resilient Families will adapt and put into practice five parenting interventions that have been found through rigorous testing to be effective at strengthening resilience among traumatized families. These interventions will serve more than 35,000 people and specifically target isolated families in transition, such as:
those with a parent deployed to war
Native American families on reservations
immigrant and refugee families
families involved in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems
families in which a parent has been killed
ITR is excited to house the groundbreaking work of this center, which furthers its mission of bridging the vast gap between research and practice in children’s mental health.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota (UMN) and the University of North Carolina (UNC) have been awarded a $4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to launch the Baby Connectome Project (BCP).
The BCP aims to provide scientists with unprecedented information about how the human brain develops from birth through early childhood and will uncover factors contributing to healthy brain development.
Jed Elison
“The UMN/UNC team is uniquely suited to perform this challenging, but critical task, and we expect the data collected and results that come from the BCP to have broad implications for understanding the most dynamic period of human brain development,” said Jed Elison, Ph.D., a co-principal investigator of the BCP and UMN assistant professor in the College of Education and Human Development’s Institute of Child Development (ICD). Elison, a McKnight Land-Grant Professor, and Kamil Ugurbil, a McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair Professor, are leading the effort together at UMN.
The BCP is a four-year research initiative of NIH, supported by Wyeth Nutrition through a gift to the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH).
The project will characterize human brain connectivity and map patterns of structural and functional connectivity to important behavioral skills from infancy to early childhood. Additional biological (e.g., genetic markers) and environmental measures (e.g., family demographics) will also be collected and examined to provide a more comprehensive picture of the factors that affect brain development. Findings from this study will provide other scientists with a definitive foundation to inform new questions about typical and atypical brain and behavioral development. Additionally, this study promises to inform policy decisions that could directly or indirectly affect healthy brain development during early childhood.
“This is an unprecedented effort to map the development of brain circuitries during a stage when our brains undergo highly dynamic changes that have life-long impacts on cognitive development. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to carry out this exciting project,” said Weili Lin, Ph.D., Dixie Soo Distinguished Professor in Neurological Medicine, director of BRIC, and co-principal investigator of the BCP.
“Wyeth Nutrition is excited to support research at UMN and UNC through our partnership with the FNIH,” said CEO of Wyeth Nutrition Mike Russomano. “This innovative research — led by two institutions at the forefront of studying brain development in children — will add to a better understanding of what is needed to support the brain development and overall health of infants and children in the critical first years of life.”
For the project, researchers at UMN and UNC will perform safe and non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans of 500 typically developing children, ages 0-5 years, over the course of 4 years. Of these 500 children, 175 will come from two other brain imaging studies already underway, one from UNC (“Early Brain Development in 1 and 2 Year Olds”, led by John Gilmore, M.D.) and one from UMN (“Infant Brain and Behavioral Signatures of Later Emerging Risk for Psychopathology,” led by Elison). All of the data collected will be shared with the broader scientific community to accelerate discovery.
The project will include longitudinal groups, where children will be scanned four to six times at different ages, and cross-sectional groups, where children will be scanned once at distinct points in their development. In addition to the imaging data collected, researchers will also obtain parent reports and direct assessment cognitive and behavioral development in the participating children. All of the collected information will inform a more comprehensive picture of how emerging patterns of brain connectivity shape behavioral development in children under the age of 5.
UMN and UNC will leverage technological innovations developed through the original Human Connectome Project (HCP), a scientific endeavor funded by the NIH to create a map of the circuitry within the human brain, to investigate the structural and functional changes that occur during typical development. This project will be part of the Lifespan Human Connectome Project (LHCP), which aims to extend the HCP to map connectivity in the developing, adult, and aging human brain. (See the UMN role in the LHCP.) It is funded by the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, a collaborative framework through which 15 NIH Institutes, Centers and Offices jointly support neuroscience-related research, with the aim of accelerating discoveries and reducing the burden of nervous system disorders.
The Educational Equity Resource Center has launched the Educator Resource Map. The map locates many educational programs provided to schools in Minnesota communities—programs with location stability and an equity component.
Just click on the map image for access to the interactive page and explore. Categories include college readiness, arts and design, early childhood, language and literacy, social studies, STEM, agriculture, and leadership.
The center will collect information and feedback for periodic updates.
Moving Toward Precision Healthcare in Children’s Mental Health:
New Perspectives, Methodologies, and Technologies in Therapeutics and Prevention
October 5, 6, 7, 2016
Cowles Auditorium
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Register here
Mental health is personal, and there is a growing body of research showing the effectiveness of highly personalized treatments. A groundbreaking conference will bring experts in the field of personalized, precision-based treatment from all over the country to Minneapolis this fall to discuss cutting edge research and practice in the field, and how it relates to children’s mental health.
“Moving Toward Precision Healthcare in Children’s Mental Health” will take place October 5-7 at the University of Minnesota’s Cowles Auditorium. It is hosted by the recently-established Institute for Translational Research in Children’s Mental Health at the University of Minnesota (ITR), which aims to bring experts together from across disciplines to bridge the gap between research and practice in children’s mental health practice.
The three-day symposium is free to attend and is open to investigators, academic professionals, and students with an interest in improving mental health outcomes for children. Participants will leave with a better understanding of one of the central questions in children’s mental health prevention and intervention work: how can effective prevention interventions be tailored to individual needs?
The National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector (NCMPS) in Washington, D.C., and Reflection Sciences, a Minnesota start-up educational technology company started by two CEHD professors, has announced a new partnership to measure Executive Function in Montessori and developmentally based education.
Executive Function (EF) capabilities are key developments in the preschool years. Sometimes called the “air traffic controller of your brain,” EF is the set of neurocognitive functions that help the brain organize and act on information. These functions enable us to pay attention, control behavior, and think flexibly — essentially, the tools that are necessary to succeed in kindergarten and beyond.
In this new program, NCMPS will work with Reflection Sciences to offer training and tools to measure these essential skills using the Minnesota Executive Function Scale (MEFS). The MEFS is a valid and reliable measure of EF that is based on the latest neuroscience, delivered on touch-screen tablet, and takes less than five minutes.
How important is Executive Function? Recent studies have shown these skills are more predictive of academic success than IQ. And like many skills, EF develops through practice. That is why it is crucial to nurture these skills at an early age.
“The MEFS gives us a simple, reliable, non-intrusive way to prove something we’ve suspected in Montessori for decades — that Montessori prepared environments, trained teachers, and learning materials support optimal child development,” said Jacqueline Cossentino, research director of NCMPS. “Now we can measure and compare Montessori’s effectiveness.”
Stephanie Carlson
Stephanie Carlson, child development professor and co-founder and CEO of Reflection Sciences, agrees with the Montessori approach. “We are so impressed with what Montessori does to promote Executive Function. By cultivating reflection though nearly everything they do in the classroom, the Montessori approach embodies best practices for building EF skills,” she said. “This is such an important part of early childhood education and they are embracing it. This is likely to have lasting positive impacts for their children, and now they will be able to measure these results.”
NCMPS is introducing the new program at eight training locations, beginning in October 2016. They will offer the MEFS to their partner schools, while Reflection Sciences will facilitate the onboarding of new schools to its cloud-based web portal and continue to offer support and additional services, such as professional development about EF and assistance with data analysis.
“With this new partnership, our educators will be more intentional in nurturing Executive Function skills, so that our students are better prepared to learn, socialize, and handle any situation that may develop in elementary school,” added Cossentino.
Founded by Carlson and professor Phil Zelazo in CEHD’s Institute of Child Development in 2014, Reflection Sciences provides professional development, training, and tools for assessing and improving Executive Function skills. Their Minnesota Executive Function Scale is the first objective, scientifically-based, and normed direct assessment of executive function for ages 2 years and up.
Digital Education and Innovation (DEI) was recognized at the 2016 Minnesota eLearning Summit Excellence Awards. Melissa Falldin, Thomas Nechodomu, and Treden Wagoner were awarded in the collaboration category for their work on the Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) Pilot. The collaboration award is given to organizations or individuals who demonstrate exceptional collaboration within a course, department, institution, or system.
The DEI team worked with CEHD’s International Initiatives and the University’s Global Strategies and Program Alliance and Center for Education Innovation to develop the two-year pilot. The pilot is an opportunity for CEHD instructors to integrate a new teaching model that gives their students international experience. The pilot also seeks to establish and document best practices for course development using the COIL model and related faculty development. DEI has developed a COIL workbook for faculty partners and is available for anyone interested in COIL.
Using open textbooks can save students hundreds of dollars per semester. Making faculty aware that they are an option, though, remains a challenge, which is why the University of Minnesota is hosting a meeting of its Open Textbook Network (OTN), Aug. 9-12.
The OTN, an alliance of nearly 250 colleges and universities across the country, will convene on the Twin Cities campus to develop strategies for advancing open textbook programs on their campuses. Participants will also gain expertise in helping faculty understand the negative impact high textbook costs can have on students’ academic performance. Over the last year, the OTN has grown by nearly 175 members.
Published under a Creative Commons license, open textbooks are available to students for free. Faculty can custom edit the textbooks to meet their needs. By using open textbooks, students can save thousands of dollars over a college career. The OTN has already saved students an estimated total of $3.1 million in textbook costs.
David Ernst
“Open textbooks eliminate the cost barrier between students and their learning,” said David Ernst, director of the Center for Open Education and executive director of the OTN. “The institutions in the Open Textbook Network are all committed to improving student success through the use of these textbooks.”
The Open Textbook Network also hosts the Open Textbook Library, the first searchable online catalog of open textbooks, many of which are reviewed by faculty at OTN institutions. Currently, more than 260 textbook titles are available for use.
The SciGirls Code project, led by co-principal investigator Cassie Scharber, kicked off with a session and advisory board meeting at the Computer Science Teachers Association conference in San Diego, July 11-14. The project, funded by the National Science Foundation’s STEM + Computing Partnerships (STEM + C) program, is a two-year project that uses the principles of connected learning with STEM outreach partners to provide 160+ girls and their educators with computational thinking and coding skills.
Cassie Scharber
Scharber, associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, leads development of curricula centering on three tracks—e-textiles and wearable tech, robotics, and mobile geospatial technologies; role model training for female technology professionals; professional development for STEM educators; and a research component that investigates the ways computational learning experiences impact the development of computational thinking as well as interest and attitudes toward computer science.
For more information, visit the SciGirls website, produced by Twin Cities Public Television.
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