Exploring the Access to Mental Health Support that Affects Elementary School Children’s Academic Achievement- Methodology and Rationale for In-Depth Analysis

Exploring the Access to Mental Health Support that Affects Elementary School Children’s Academic Achievement- Methodology and Rationale for In-Depth Analysis

The project seeks to determine if having access to mental health support affects elementary school children’s academic achievement. The teachers will be surveyed to complete this discovery. Hence, teachers from the local elementary schools will be invited to participate in the research. The local elementary school principals will be the first point of communication as these will be sent emails requesting the participation of their teachers. The independent variable examines the effects of a multi-tier support system in schools, specifically mental health, on academic performance. The information will be collected via questionnaires administered to the participating teachers. A pilot test will be done which will allow the researcher to refine the questions in the final research instrument.

As stated, data will be collected via questionnaires administered to the teachers. These will be sent through the respective school emails. A thematic analysis will be done in analyzing the data collected using questionnaires. Additionally, a focus group will be conducted where the participants will have a forum to discuss the effects of mental health support on the academic performance of their students. The discussions will be transcribed on tape. Data from the focus group will be described and analyzed using Verbastat software.

The information collected from the focus group discussions will be coded, and conclusions will be drawn from the main themes highlighted in the discussions. The conclusions will be written in draft form and presented to another party to read through and confirm whether the conclusions are accurate and unbiased.

The rationale of the Study

Children need hope, and schools have come to realize that it is important to address mental health issues both for the purpose of academics and to help children realize a bright future. Several states have increased their funding for counseling services in schools and have proceeded to hire psychologists as part of the staff. It is estimated that close to 25% of children in the school-going age face health challenges on the behavioral and mental health levels. Most of these grow up into adolescence and adulthood are not sufficiently treated, leaving them vulnerable to negative school outcomes such as academic, behavioral, and attendance problems. One of the most common hindrances to accessing treatment for students is care consistency and appropriateness, including intervention and assessment. Most times, when children in schools are identified as having problems and challenges with mental health, such a child oftentimes is referred to a community to access treatment. However, according to Walter et al. (2019), Multitiered systems of support (MTSS) provide promotion/prevention, clinical treatment services, and early intervention/identification and have been shown to be a means of mental health services delivery in the school setting. Schools that take part in early intervention were shown to have improved significantly in the areas of coping skills, social-emotional competencies, and more so, students at the highest risk, as well as students with mental disorders who had taken part in clinical treatment and recorded improved functioning and symptoms. Based on these findings, this research seeks to find out if mental health care, including utilizing an MTSS, positively affects children’s elementary academic performance.

Reference

Walter, H. J., Kaye, A. J., Dennery, K. M., & DeMaso, D. R. (2019). Three‐Year Outcomes of a School‐Hospital Partnership Providing Multitiered Mental Health Services in Urban Schools. Journal of School Health, 89(8), 643-652.

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Methodology and Rationale

Methodology and Rationale Instructions
Prompt: In 100-300 words describe a hypothetical methodology for studying your research topic.
In the same document, in 250-350 words, create a rationale for a scholarly audience of experts on
your topic justifying studying your proposed research question to your audience. Include your
title page and use Level-1 Headings to separate these two sections.
Requirements:
1. Do not use the first or second person in the rationale, but you may use the first person in the
methodology.
2. In addition to a specific explanation of how you will test your research question, your
methodology should explain how you will analyze the data and how you would recognize
a significant result. Use the following outline to build your methodology paragraph.
Generally, 1-2 sentences will be enough for each item:

• a. Explain who or what your sample is and how you will gather that sample.
  

  Methodology and Rational

  b. Describe your independent variable’s process.
  c. Describe how you will collect and observe your data.
  d. Describe how you will analyze your data as you observe the dependent variable.
  e. Describe what a significant result would look like.

3. In your rationale, the question you are answering is this: Why is your research proposal a
good way to study this problem, and why should we fund this research? Pretend you are
convincing a board of academics in this field that your research proposal is worth
financial support. Remember: your audience is already experts in the field, so you do not
need to explain basic principles.
4. Your grammar, spelling, and punctuation should be flawless. Visit the Liberty University
writing centers if you want extra help:
https://www.liberty.edu/academics/casas/academicsuccess/index.cfm?PID=38382
5. Use APA formatting with the title; no abstract is required, but do include a reference page
if you use sources.
Additional Suggestions for Methodology:

1.  Look up methodologies in the journal articles you have been researching and use those as models and guides.
2.  Everyone’s methodology will look a little bit different. Your methodology may include an experiment with two groups getting different treatments, one group that gets tested before and after a treatment, or a large group of people filling out a survey. Or you may be suggesting a research proposal that involves reading literature and analyzing it. You may also want to use a specific research tool that someone has already created (an example for the behavioral sciences could be the Rorschach Inkblot Test).
3. Remember that simply reading textbooks or other journal articles is just secondary research. A good methodology does primary research and finds new information rather
   than just compiling old information.
4. Whatever you do, make sure that your results cannot be brought into question. For instance, if you wanted to test the effects of a drug on humans and did not clarify what humans, I might wonder if your results would be skewed because more or fewer men or women could be in different experimental groups than in the others. Be specific about your demographics or aspects of your methodology.
5. Or if you were doing a study of postmodern literature but did not say when the postmodern era began, you would get very different results based on your cutoff date.
6. You can be creative with your methodology, but you must also be skeptical. Would you have faith in your methods to return a reliable result?
7. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to get started:

A. What would I need to find to suggest that my hypothesis is correct?
B. How can I eliminate variables that might confuse my results? (i.e. If studying
effects of sunlight on positivity in a work environment, make sure you are not also
adding free food or opportunities to walk around.)
C. If you’re studying humans, which ones, and why does it matter? How old are
they? What ethnicity? What religion? What income level? What education level?
Not all of these will matter for every study (education level would be more
important than religion in studying the effects of education on earning potential), but
identify the ones that do.
D. If you’re doing textual analysis, what texts do you plan to analyze? And what will
you be looking for when you read them?

Additional Suggestions for Rationales:

1. Usually, the introduction of a journal article shares some similarities with a
   rationale—they both typically mention the problem being studied and why it’s important
   to learn about it. Use the journal articles you’ve researched so far as models and guides
   for developing your rationale.
2. Your rationale will likely be 1-2 paragraphs.
3. You can begin your first paragraph with a mini-thesis statement that sounds something
   like “Research Topic X is important to study because a significant finding will have such-
   and-such an effect(s).” Use your own words, but those key elements (research topic,
   value judgment, effect(s) that is important to your audience, etc.) should appear in your
   justification.
4. The rest of your rationale can expand on these effects as you connect those to your
   audience and show the importance of what you are proposing to study.
5. The last sentence of your rationale should summarize your main idea and emphasize the
   importance again.
6. Knowing the values of your audience members is important (and sharing those values is
   also helpful). Remember to speak in terms of what your audience (the people you want to
   convince) wants. Are they philanthropic and want to help others? Are they considering
   you for a research grant to promote an area of study they care about? Don’t make it
   obvious you’re talking to someone in particular (i.e. “Because my audience loves
   children, I want to study children.”), but consistently speak in terms of the benefits others
   will receive from what you find. These do not need to be big benefits either—research is
   often a series of small steps toward big conclusions.