Kelly Edyburn of the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology (CCSP) of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School has won the 2016 Gale Morrison Award for Research in the School Setting. Edyburn won the prize for her work “Cultural Mismatch and Conjoint Behavioral Consultation.” Edyburn will be entering her third year in CCSP with an emphasis in School Psychology. Her advisor is Dr. Matt Quirk.
Edyburn’s work covered the process of applying a conjoint behavioral consultation model to her work with the parents and teacher of a second grade student. She framed the case study in the context of cultural mismatch, as the public education workforce and the students they serve increasingly come from different social, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds, which can engender incongruence in norms, expectations, and interactions, and is associated with disproportionate referrals of minority students for special education. However, Edyburn believes cultural mismatch represents an opportunity: individuals from diverse backgrounds can come together and collaborate on common goals. Conjoint behavioral consultation—a model of family-school collaboration based on the premise that both home and school are critical environments for shaping child behavior and development and that leverages the strengths of both systems—as a means, on a micro-level, by which to address cultural mismatch and support students’ academic, behavioral, and social emotional development. In this case, cultural mismatch was a concern in several areas (e.g., behavioral norms, communication preferences, language differences), which guided Edyburn to select a conjoint behavioral consultation model to establish consistency across settings for a student struggling with inattentive, disruptive, and aggressive behaviors. Collaboratively, they identified the target behaviors, set individualized behavior goals, developed a program of evidence-based interventions, implemented the interventions, made adjustments to the interventions based on fidelity and progress monitoring data, and continued collecting data to evaluate the success of the intervention. Overall, the consultation had moderate to large positive effects in terms of the students’ behavior. There were also encouraging process effects—e.g., improved communication between teacher and parents, increased perspective-taking for the teacher.
The Gale Morrison Award for Research in the School Setting represents an appreciation of the inherent complexities of learning to work as a school psychologist in the schools. At the core of working effectively in school settings, where children are developing academic and social competencies within the complex environments including classrooms and other school-situated social situations, is the emerging professional’s ability to practice patience with their learning process and tolerate the ambiguity within many of the situations they encounter. At the same time, with increased knowledge and experience comes the obligation to explore and document how we know that we have been effective in our practice. How do we know that our interventions are effective? How to we document that for others? It is success with these professional attitudes and practice that we celebrate with this award. Thus, the Gale Morrison Award for Research in the School Setting is given to a student who has conducted an evaluation of their work in the school setting that demonstrates a positive impact on students, parents, and/or teachers.
The award was originally developed to honor emeritus professor and twice interim dean Gale Morrison, and to pay tribute to her role as a leader and founder of the School Psychology emphasis at the Gevirtz School. Morrison, in turn, honored the school by offering to fund a cash prize associated with the award.