The Graduate College is pleased to present Universal Screening for Social, Emotional, Behavioral Health in Schools: Students and Teachers At Risk, a lecture by University Scholar Kimberly J. Vannest, Ph.D., on Monday, November 1, 2021 at 4:30 p.m. in Waterman Memorial Lounge.

Public schools routinely screen for vision, hearing, or academic learning problems, but few schools in the United States engage in screening for social, emotional, or behavioral risk despite evidence that 1 in 5 children may need services and research indicating emotions and behavior impact learning outcomes.This educational omission deprives equal access to learning environments or quality educational experiences—particularly when school settings are the access point to social supports and mental health care for youth. How can we better approach this challenge: What can we do, what should we do, and why aren’t we doing it? It is time to do better.

Dr. Vannest is Professor and Chair in the Department of Education, College of Education and Social Services. Her areas of scholarship include academic and behavioral interventions in school settings for children and youth with emotional and behavioral health issues and the measurement of treatment effects through single-case experimental design and meta-analysis. Dr. Vannest has authored and co-authored 12 books and encyclopedias, 9 book chapters and nearly 100 manuscripts. She has created a number of free online resources, which have had a profound and ever-growing impact on special education and beyond, including an effect size calculator, behavioral/academic progress monitoring systems, and pioneering new single case analysis techniques such as the Improvement Rate Difference, Non-Overlap of Pairs, and TauU. Dr. Vannest has been contiguously funded for 2 decades and is currently a Co-Principal Investigator on an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) grant and has successfully collaborated or led more than 20 grants through the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Education, and National Science Foundation. Currently, Dr. Vannest serves as the President for The Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders, works as a reviewer for federal funding agencies and is an editorial board member for leading journals in Education, Special Education, Counseling, School Psychology, Assessment, and Methodology. She is a frequent guest lecturer at tier one research universities around the country and a requested keynote at national and international conferences. Her former doctoral students are professors and leaders around the country in higher education. Current book projects include a comprehensive guide for social, emotional, and behavioral learning in schools.