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Achievement motivation is not a fixed quantity. Rather, it depends, in part, on one’s subjective construal of the learning environment and their place within it – their narrative. In this paper, we describe how brief interventions can maximize student motivation by changing the students’ narratives.

We review the recent field experiments testing the efficacy of social-psychological interventions in classroom settings. We focus our review on four types of interventions: ones that change students’ interpretations of setbacks, that reframe the learning environment as fair and nonthreatening, that remind students of their personal adequacy, or that clarify students’ purpose for learning.

Such interventions can have long-lasting benefits if changes in students’ narratives lead to initial achievement gains, which further propagate positive narratives, in a positive feedback loop. Yet social-psychological interventions are not magical panaceas for poor achievement. Rather, they must be targeted to specific populations, timed appropriately, and given in a context in which students have opportunities to act upon the messages they contain.

Social-psychological interventions can help many students realize their achievement potential if they are integrated within a supportive learning context.

The issue of school violence and antisocial behavior in public schools is, in fact, one of the most pressing concerns in education today. Schools have responded by designing, implementing, and evaluating multi-level models with progressively more intensive levels of support. The foundation of these models is the primary, or universal, prevention program. To date, most investigations have occurred in elementary schools thereby providing limited insight into intervening in secondary schools. This chapter reviews the literature base of school-wide interventions with primary level efforts conducted in secondary schools with an emphasis on methodological considerations. Content includes the findings of a systematic literature review, a discussion of quality indicators in relationship to primary prevention efforts, and recommendations for future inquiry.

We analyze the economic consequence of government intervention on the incidence of accounting fraud and audit fees of both Big 4 and local big auditors on Chinese audit market in the period 2006–2013. In 2009, Chinese government issued favorable polices to local big auditors and required certain Chinese companies to give priority to these auditors. We find that market share of Big 4 auditors is quite stable before and after government intervention, but market share of local big auditors increases at the cost of local small auditors after intervention. Although audit fee premiums of both local big and Big 4 auditors have increased after intervention, the positive effect of local big auditors on audit fee premiums has significantly decreased. Further, both Big 4 and local big auditors are not likely to reduce the incidence of accounting fraud in pre- and post-intervention period. Our results suggest that Chinese government support to local auditors does not significantly enhance these auditors’ competitiveness in terms of audit fee and audit quality.

This chapter reviews successful pedagogical interventions in teaching literacy in languages of teaching and learning in the upper primary grades in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and explores how researchers and teachers decolonized classroom spaces to ensure student achievement of learning outcomes. Themes emerging from the analysis of data are biliteracy interventions, interventions in official and national languages, teacher professional development, and ecological interventions. Results of the review indicate that researchers decolonized classroom spaces by using student linguistic repertoires, evidence-based pedagogical strategies student cultural capital and engaging families and communities. The review also reveals that more research needs to be conducted on teaching and learning in upper primary grades. The linguistic diversity of LMICs provides rich contexts for more research in bilingual education and L2 acquisition which could be useful worldwide as stakeholders in the education process explore the best ways to improve learning outcomes in schools.

Identity exploration is a central mechanism for identity formation that has been found to be associated with intense engagement, positive coping, openness to change, flexible cognition, and meaningful learning. Moreover, identity exploration in school has been associated with adaptive motivation for learning the academic material. Particularly in the fast-changing environment of contemporary society, confidence and skills in identity exploration and self-construction seems to be increasingly important. Therefore, promoting students’ identity exploration in school within the curriculum and in relation to the academic content should be adopted as an important educational goal. The purpose of this paper is to describe a conceptual framework for interventions to promote students’ identity exploration within the curriculum. The framework involves the application of four interrelated principles: (1) promoting self-relevance; (2) triggering exploration; (3) facilitating a sense of safety; and (4) scaffolding exploratory actions.

We begin the paper with a conceptual review of identity exploration. We follow by specifying the conceptual framework for interventions. We then present a methodological-intervention approach for applying this framework and describe three such interventions in middle-school contexts, in the domains of environmental education, literature, and mathematics.

In each intervention, applying the principles contributed to students’ adaptive motivation and engagement in the academic material and also contributed to students’ identity exploration, though not among all students. The findings highlight the contextual, dynamic, and indeterminate nature of identity exploration among early adolescents in educational settings, and the utility of the conceptual framework and approach for conceptualizing and intervening to promote identity exploration among students.

This paper contributes to the conceptual understanding of identity exploration in educational settings, highlights the benefits and the challenges in intervening to promote identity exploration among students, and discusses the future directions in theory, research, and practice concerned with the promotion of identity exploration in educational settings.

In this introductory chapter of volume 32 of Advances in Learning and Behavioral Disabilities, we provide an overview of the considerations of intensive, individualized interventions and preview the 10 chapters in the volume. We asked chapter authors to consider the full scope of delivering such learning and behavioral interventions – describing tiered systems of support, identifying students who require intensive and individualized interventions, presenting elements associated with such interventions, and identifying specific examples of intensive and individualized interventions.

This chapter reviews recent research regarding behavior interventions for young children. We first consider the implications of allowing maladaptive behavior to remain untreated in young children. The reasons that people may select for inaction are illustrated through a case example of an individual who manifested behavior problems that were allowed to continue through accommodations rather than being addressed through interventions. We then consider several examples of promising behavior interventions for very young children that can be carried out in home and preschool environments. Next, we review promising interventions that are appropriate for school-based settings. We conclude with the observation that while it is absolutely necessary to deal with urgent situations evoked by maladaptive behavior, it is critical to keep sight of the goal that we should always work to promote more mature, self-regulated, and acceptable behaviors across settings.

Existing experimental and quasi-experimental results have demonstrated that both anticorruption initiatives that provide information and/or authority to the recipients of government programs – so-called “bottom-up” interventions – and initiatives that rely on government agencies for enforcement – “top-down” interventions – can be effective in some settings. Yet, in other instances, both forms of intervention have been found to be ineffective in combating corruption. These contrasting results strongly suggest that the effectiveness of both “top-down” and “bottom-up” anticorruption interventions is conditional on other factors. Unfortunately, the existing literature says little regarding the conditions conducive to the success of either forms of intervention. Assessing the conditional effects of anticorruption treatments poses substantial challenges for researchers – particularly for those employing experimental or quasi-experimental approaches. This chapter (1) discusses factors that may condition the effectiveness of both top-down and bottom-up interventions; (2) illustrates the difficulties in assessing these conditional relationships, with particular reference to experimental and quasi-experimental settings; and (3) suggests approaches that might mitigate these problems.

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are a major cause of concern because of the high levels of associated morbidity, mortality, and cost. In addition, children and intensive care unit (ICU) patients are more vulnerable to these infections due to low levels of immunity. Various medical interventions and statistical process control techniques have been suggested to counter the spread of these infections and aid early detection of an infection outbreak. Methods such as hand hygiene help in the prevention of HAIs and are well-documented in the literature. This chapter demonstrates the utilization of a systems methodology to model and validate factors that contribute to the risk of HAIs in a pediatric ICU. It proposes an approach that has three unique aspects: it studies the problem of HAIs as a whole by focusing on several HAIs instead of a single type, it projects the effects of interventions onto the general patient population using the system-level model, and it studies both medical and behavioral interventions and compares their effectiveness. This methodology uses a systems modeling framework that includes simulation, risk analysis, and statistical techniques for studying interventions to reduce the transmission likelihood of HAIs.