Joshua R Polanin

American Institutes for Research | AIR · Research & Evaluation

We conducted a comprehensive, systematic review and meta-analysis on the effects of the BSCS 5E Instructional Model—and its related variants—on science, math, and motivation outcomes. The 5E Instructional Model is a framework for delivering STEM instruction that is based on constructivist learning theory; it has been used throughout the U.S. and ot...

The College Board reported that, in 2022–2023, about two thirds of $177 billion in U.S. financial assistance awarded to undergraduates through programs sponsored by the federal government, state governments, colleges and universities, philanthropic organizations, and other entities was in the form of grants. While researchers have examined the effe...

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are important techniques because they synthesize results from multiple primary studies on a similar topic. To influence policy, practice, and research, however, synthesis researchers must translate the results for various audiences. Ideally, the translation drives future research agendas, informs policymaking, o...

Cyberbullying among youth is an emerging public health concern that has a wide array of deleterious outcomes. The current meta-analytic review synthesized school-based cyberbullying prevention programs’ impact on promoting cyber-bystander intervention among K–12 students. As a result of exhaustive searches and a thorough screening procedure, a tota...

Evidence suggests that cyberbullying among school-age children is related to problem behaviors and other adverse school performance constructs. As a result, numerous school-based programs have been developed and implemented to decrease cyberbullying perpetration and victimization. Given the extensive literature and variation in program effectivenes...

The daily challenges resulting from all types of school violence-such as physical aggression, bullying, peer victimization, and general threats-have the potential to affect, longitudinally, students' mental health, school performance, and involvement in criminal or delinquent acts. Across primary and secondary studies, however, variation in how and...

Systematic review and meta-analysis are possible as viable research techniques only through transparent reporting of primary research; thus, one might expect meta-analysts to demonstrate best practice in their reporting of results and have a high degree of transparency leading to reproducibility of their work. This assumption has yet to be fully te...

Meta-analysts rely on the availability of data from previously conducted studies. That is, they rely on primary study authors to register their outcome data, either in a study’s text or on publicly available websites, and report the results of their work, either again in a study’s text or on publicly accessible data repositories. If a primary study...

The original publication of this article contained the wrong image in Figure 1. The correct Figure 1 is presented at the next page.

Suicide continues to be the second-leading cause of death for all youths aged 15–24. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth are at a significantly higher risk for suicidal thoughts or behaviors (STB). Establishing and understanding correlates of STB among LGBTQ youth is one important step toward enhancing prevention, int...

This methodological guidance article discusses the elements of a high-quality meta-analysis that is conducted within the context of a systematic review. Meta-analysis, a set of statistical techniques for synthesizing the results of multiple studies, is used when the guiding research question focuses on a quantitative summary of study results. In th...

screening is one important aspect of conducting a high‐quality and comprehensive systematic review and meta‐analysis. Abstract screening allows the review team to conduct the tedious but vital first step to synthesize the extant literature: winnowing down the overwhelming amalgamation of citations discovered through research databases to the citati...

Social-ecological theory of school bullying stresses the role parents play in students’ engagement in bullying. School practitioners and the researchers who support practitioners are often recommended to involve parents in their efforts to implement school-based prevention efforts. Yet, empirical support for this recommendation is scarce. Although...

Objective: To examine the proportion of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) meeting recommended physical activity guidelines for Americans (PAG) and determine differences in physical activity (PA) by sex and between NHPI and Asians when data are disaggregated. Design: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Setting: Articles identified in...

A priori power analyses allow researchers to estimate the number of participants needed to detect the effects of an intervention. However, power analyses are only as valid as the parameter estimates used. One such parameter, the expected effect size, can vary greatly depending on several study characteristics, including the nature of the interventi...

Second Step is a universal social-emotional learning program designed to decrease antisocial behaviors, increase prosocial behaviors, and increase knowledge about content curriculum. Given the international focus of using Second Step to improve social-emotional skills, it is especially important to provide an updated synthesis on the effect of the...

Studies of interventions’ impact on reading self-efficacy have been conducted since the 1980s. The purpose of this project was to conduct a systematic review of these studies because the primary studies often yielded divergent results. Included studies entailed an intervention, addressed reading specifically, and reported explicit pre- and postinte...

This study examined the relationships between academic self-efficacy, academic motivation, social support, school belonging, home-school dissonance, and academic intentions in a sample of 762 Mexican American 9th graders attending a Midwestern public school. Using Structural Equation Modeling, we examined a model where academic self-efficacy and mo...

Meta-analysis is a statistical technique that allows an analyst to synthesize effect sizes from multiple primary studies. To estimate meta-analysis models, the open-source statistical environment R is quickly becoming a popular choice. The meta-analytic community has contributed to this growth by developing numerous packages specific to meta-analys...

This practice guide presents six evidence-based recommendations for college and university faculty, administrators, and advisors working to improve the success of students academically underprepared for college. Each recommendation includes an overview of the practice, a summary of evidence used in support of the evidence rating, guidance on how to...

A modification of the first stage of the standard procedure for two-stage meta-analytic structural equation modeling for use with large complex datasets is presented. This modification addresses two common problems that arise in such meta-analyses: (a) primary studies that provide multiple measures of the same construct and (b) the correlation coef...

Individual participant data (IPD) is the backbone of scientific inquiry and important to a meta-analysis for a variety of reasons. It is therefore important to be able to access IPD, and yet, obstacles persist that make it difficult for meta-analysts, as well as interested primary study analysts, to obtain it. In this paper, we discuss the barriers...

Parenting self-efficacy (PSE) includes parents' self-perceptions regarding their capabilities in performing the numerous and changing tasks associated with parenting a specific child (i.e., domain-specific PSE) as well as their self-perceptions in the parenting role overall (i.e., domain-general PSE). Prior literature has demonstrated PSE's relatio...

Purpose Identifying and understanding causal risk factors for crime over the life-course is a key area of inquiry in developmental criminology. Prospective longitudinal studies provide valuable information about the relationships between risk factors and later criminal offending. Meta-analyses that synthesize findings from these studies can summari...

One question posed continually over the past century of education research is to what extent school resources affect student outcomes. From the turn of the century to the present, a diverse set of actors, including politicians, physicians, and researchers from a number of disciplines, have studied whether and how money that is provided for schools...

The incidence of violence in dating relationships has a significant impact on young people, including decreased mental and physical health. This review is the first to provide a quantitative synthesis of empirical evaluations of school-based programs implemented in middle and high schools that sought to prevent or reduce incidents of dating violenc...

This 3-year study evaluated the effectiveness of the Second Step–Student Success Through Prevention (SS-SSTP) social-emotional learning program on increasing prosocial behaviors that could serve as protective factors against peer conflict and bullying among students with disabilities. Participants included 123 students with disabilities across 12 s...

Objective: To examine the relationships between study quality, author prestige, journal impact factors, and citation rates of trials; and to examine whether journal impact factors mediated the relationships between study quality and author prestige on citation rates. Study design and setting: We used bibliometric data from 128 controlled trials...

Overviews, or syntheses of research syntheses, have become a popular approach to synthesizing the rapidly expanding body of research and systematic reviews. Despite their popularity, few guidelines exist and the state of the field in education is unclear. The purpose of this study is to describe the prevalence and current state of overviews of educ...

Background. Breastfeeding is associated with a decreased risk of obesity in the early and adult years. Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPI) experience high rates of obesity which is often obfuscated with aggregated data. Using disaggregated data, we examined breastfeeding practices among NHPI. Methods. Seven databases and reference lists w...

Social-emotional learning programs are increasingly being implemented in U.S. schools to address a wide range of problematic behaviors (e.g., bullying, delinquency) and to promote academic success. The current study examined the direct and indirect impact of the Second Step Middle School Program (Committee for Children, 2008) on bullying, cyberbull...

Contemporary research on adolescent involvement in religion and delinquency is generally traced to Hirschi and Stark’s 1969 study, titled “Hellfire and Delinquency.” Their study surprised many by reporting no significant relationship between religious involvement and delinquency. Subsequent replications provided mixed results, but multiple reviews,...

This is a proposal for a meta-analysis that is currently underway. The meta-analysis focuses on illuminating evidence-based pathways to prosocial behavior and development in children and youth (ages 3-18).

Practitioners and policymakers rely on meta-analyses to inform decision making around the allocation of resources to individuals and organizations. It is therefore paramount to consider the validity of these results. A well-documented threat to the validity of research synthesis results is the presence of publication bias, a phenomenon where studie...

Results of a 3-year randomized clinical trial of Second Step: Student Success Through Prevention (SS-SSTP) Middle School Program on reducing bullying, physical aggression, and peer victimization among students with disabilities are presented. Teachers implemented 41 lessons of a sixth- to eighth-grade curriculum that focused on social-emotional lea...

The popularity, demand, and increased federal and private funding for after-school programs have resulted in a marked increase in after-school programs over the past two decades. After-school programs are used to prevent adverse outcomes, decrease risks, or improve functioning with at-risk youth in several areas, including academic achievement, cri...

This Campbell systematic review examines the effectiveness of school‐based interventions to reduce or prevent violence in intimate relationships. The review focused on programmes to change attitudes and beliefs, reduce perpetration and victimization, and change behaviours. The systematic review included 23 studies. Prevention programmes improve you...

Objectives: Increasing professional nurses' and nursing students cultural competence has been identified as one way to decrease the disparity of care for vulnerable and minority groups, but effectiveness of training programs to increase competence remains equivocal. The purpose of this project is to synthesize educational interventions designed to...

This study examined dissemination and reporting biases in the brief alcohol intervention literature. We used retrospective data from 179 controlled trials included in a meta-analysis on brief alcohol interventions for adolescents and young adults. We examined whether the magnitude and direction of effect sizes were associated with publication type,...

This study represents the second validation phase of the Postpartum Worry Scale-Revised (PWS-R). As the PWS-R includes items tapping infant health and development concerns, we compare its psychometric properties with a sample of NICU mothers and the online sample used in the initial validation. We conduct a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to fit...

This study examines how teacher and staff perceptions of the school environment correlate with student self-reports of bullying, aggression, victimization, and willingness to intervene in bullying incidents using multi-informant, multilevel modeling. Data were derived from 3,616 6th grade students across 36 middle schools in the Midwest, who comple...

The purpose of this study is to (a) validate the psychometric properties of the Perceived Employment Barrier Scale (PEBS) and (b) investigate the effect of perceived barriers on employment hope. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA), a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and a series of invariance tests were conducted to validate PEBS using two inde...

Meta-analysis multiplicity, the concept of conducting multiple tests of statistical significance within one review, is an underdeveloped literature. We address this issue by considering how Type I errors can impact meta-analytic results, suggest how statistical power may be affected through the use of multiplicity corrections, and propose how meta-...

Employment hope is an aspect of psychological self-sufficiency that captures the process of empowerment for low-income job seekers. It is posited that this process of maintaining and developing employment hope contributes to the economic self-sufficiency outcome. The preliminary 14-item 2-factor Employment Hope Scale (EHS) was previously developed...

School bullying and delinquent behaviors are persistent and pervasive problems for schools, and have lasting effects for all individuals involved (Copeland et al., JAMA Psychiatry 70:419–426, 2013; Espelage et al., J Res Adolesc 24(2):337–349, 2013a). As a result, policymakers and practitioners have attempted to thwart these ill-effects using schoo...

Outcome-reporting bias occurs when primary studies do not include information about all outcomes measured in a study. When studies omit findings on important measures, efforts to synthesize the research using systematic review techniques will be biased and interpretations of individual studies will be incomplete. Outcome-reporting bias has been wel...

Postpartum anxiety is a condition of concern due to associated difficulties for the mother, her relationships, and her infant's development. We revised one measure of postpartum anxiety symptoms, the Postpartum Worry Scale (PWS) to include items that tap concerns related to infant health and development, important potential domains of postpartum wo...

The current study examined the extent to which college women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors demonstrated differential levels of leadership capacity and/or leader efficacy than their non-STEM, female peers. Data represented 14,698 women from 86 institutions of higher education in the United States. Results indicated simi...

Purpose: To evaluate the impact of the Second Step: Student Success Through Prevention (SS-SSTP) Middle School Program on reducing youth violence including peer aggression, peer victimization, homophobic name calling, and sexual violence perpetration and victimization among middle school sixth-grade students. Methods: The study design was a nest...

Despite the veritable influence of the peer context on the elaboration of adolescent aggression, few studies of relational aggression have directly identified and measured peer groups, limiting our ability to draw formal conclusions about the level and nature of peer influence. The current study used a developmental framework to examine peer group...

Systematic reviews and meta-analysis are techniques for synthesizing primary empirical studies to produce a summary of effects. To facilitate this goal, the Campbell Collaboration (C2) supports reviews within the disciplines of crime and justice, education, international development, and social welfare. At the annual Campbell Colloquium, experts on...

Date revised - 20130325, Last updated - 2013-03-26, DOI - PSIN-2013-09605-001; 2013-09605-001; 0047-2891; 1573-6601, SubjectsTermNotLitGenreText - No terms assigned

This study examined the associations among gender, empathy, attitudes toward bullying, willingness to intervene, and bullying within peer groups in a sample of sixth and seventh-grade students (N = 346; M Age = 12.22 years). Peer groups were identified via social network analysis using NEGOPY (Richards, 1995) and peer-group predictors were evaluate...

This paper presents methods for combining individual participant data (IPD) with aggregated study level data (AD) in a meta-analysis of correlational studies. Although medical researchers have employed IPD in a wide range of studies, only a single example exists in the social sciences. New policies at the National Science Foundation requiring grant...

This meta-analysis synthesized bullying prevention programs' effectiveness at increasing bystander intervention in bullying situations. Evidence from 12 school-based programs, involving 12,874 students, indicated that overall the programs were successful (Hedges's g = .20, 95% confidence interval [CI] = .11 to .29, p < .001), with larger effects fo...

Objectives: The Employment Hope scale (EHS) was designed to measure the empowerment-based self-sufficiency (SS) outcome among low-income job-seeking clients. This measure captures the psychological SS dimension as opposed to the more commonly used economic SS in workforce development and employment support practice. The study validates the EHS and...

The field of education is diverse, its history marred with politically driven problems, and its research ill-funded and often disaggregated. Indeed researchers of the past have questioned education research's purpose (Kaestle, 1993) while researchers of the present doubt the field's ability to evaluate properly its current researchers and research...