Faith Zabek

Georgia State University | GSU · Department of Counseling and Psychological Services

Telementoring is a low-cost, flexible way for school mental health professionals to access professional learning. Using a mixed-methods intervention design, we examined the impact of prolonged telementoring on school mental health professionals’ (school counselors, psychologists, social workers, and others) understanding and application of evidence...

School climate measures are increasingly utilized as one indicator of school quality within educational accountability systems. However, concerns have been raised about the accuracy of these indicators given that school climate surveys are often not validated using multilevel methods. Further, cross-school comparisons in climate may not be trustwor...

Mental health concerns are on the rise among youth, contributing to a growing need for school-based mental health services. However, challenges to service provision arise due, in part, to workforce shortages, service fragmentation, and inefficient allocation of staff time. The current study describes the professional competencies and time allocatio...

Scant research exists on adolescent thinking about sexual harassment (SH), and even less on Black adolescents’ thinking. We listened to Black students as they thought aloud about a hypothetical SH dilemma. Participants were 7th graders (N = 21, 10 girls, M = 13.2 years, SD = 2.9) who identified as Black or African American. We presented a hypotheti...

In this study, we take a situationally specific approach to understanding how Black girls perceive, process, and respond to a hypothetical social situation. Through this, we aim to contribute to developmental inquiry that resists deficit thinking by foregrounding the voices of Black girls. The current study took place within the participatory cultu...

Despite decades of retirement plan enrollment meetings, many employees fail to fully engage in their employer-sponsored retirement plans. Under the framework of the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) of Behavior Change, this study examines the effectiveness of a financial psychology intervention designed to increase engagement in employer-sponsored retir...

Previous research has demonstrated that financial behaviors, such as saving behaviors, are heavily influenced by emotion. This study sought to determine what effect engaging people emotionally using a sentimental item would have on their saving behaviors. A double-blind, randomized experiment was conducted comparing a financial psychology session t...

School climate has increasingly been recognized as an essential component of school improvement owing to the established associations between a positive school climate and academic outcomes for students. Our study examines associations among a brief measure of school climate assessing elementary student perceptions and the College and Career Ready...

Executive functions (EFs) develop rapidly in preschoolers and lay an important foundation for school readiness. One potential method of supporting EF development is through mindfulness‐based interventions (MBIs). Whereas studies with older children and adults have supported this approach, research with young children has been more limited. In the c...

Helping skills courses play a vital role in counseling curriculum, but also tend to bring excessive anxiety for students, to the point of impeding their ability to successfully implement skills. This article describes specific creative and experiential activities, aimed at reducing anxiety in a helping skills course for counselors-in-training.

The challenges of developing and researching a school-based prevention program using the participatory culture-specific intervention model are described here. We outline the problem of commercial sexual exploitation of children that motivated our project and the characteristics of students most at risk (African American girls in middle school). We...

In disadvantaged neighborhoods African American girls are at elevated risk for exposure to violence and sexualization (Miller, 2008; Salazar, Wingood, DiClemente, Lan, & Harrington, 2004). Preventive interventions can promote resilience by supporting capacities such as social decision making and self-understanding (Masten, 2001). We report on an af...