Diverse Perspectives on Evidence-Based Practice
Thursday, 2:30 PM - 4:15 PM
Hynes CC 208

Chair: Joan Lucariello, Boston College

The public policy and federal funding scenes are consumed with the goal of achieving and assessing “evidence-based” practices. Strong pressure is on all researchers doing applied work to demonstrate that such reflects "evidence-based practice." Those whose research areas are related to education, clinical psychology, and health must be attentive to this issue as the federal funding agencies are emphasizing empirical evidence that meets this criterion. This symposium includes four eminent scholars who are expert in issues around evidence-based research and practice and whose insights on such can inform researchers as they plan their own proposals.

Discussant: Celia Fisher, Fordham University

Celia B. Fisher, Ph.D. is the Marie Ward Doty Professor of Psychology and Director of the Fordham University Center for Ethics Education. Dr Fisher is author of Decoding the Ethics Code: A Practical Guide for Psychologists (Sage Publications), co-editor of 5 books including Ethical Issues in Mental Health Research with Children and Adolescents (Erlbaum Associates) and The Handbook of Ethical Research with Ethnocultural Populations and Communities (Sage Publications), author of over 100 publications in the areas of ethics and life-span development and of commissioned papers for the President’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission on relational ethics and vulnerable populations and on the ethics of suicide research for NIMH. She has developed assessment instruments to evaluate how teenagers and parents from different racial/ethnic backgrounds prepare for and react to racial discrimination, examined the validity of child abuse assessment techniques in institutional and forensic settings, and family attitudes toward involvement of adolescents in decisions to participate in pediatric cancer research.

Presentation 1
Scientific Evidence about What Promotes Children’s Health, Education and Well-Being
Speaker: Sharon L. Ramey, Georgetown University Center on Health and Education

Biographical Sketch
Sharon Landesman Ramey is a developmental scientist who has studied the environmental and biological factors that contribute to the health and educational outcomes of vulnerable young children. She is the Susan H. Mayer Professor of Child and Family Studies, Professor of Psychiatry, and the Founding Director (along with her husband, Dr. Craig T. Ramey) of the Georgetown University Center on Health and Education. Her research includes both longitudinal observational studies and randomized controlled trials of interventions to improve pregnancy outcomes, infant and toddler development, family functioning and home and school environments to promote positive development. Sharon Ramey and her colleagues have developed and tested innovative prevention and treatment programs for children from highly impoverished backgrounds and children with developmental disabilities. For more than 30 years, Sharon Ramey has developed partnerships with state and local agencies, service providers, advocacy organizations, and local communities in order to conduct community-based trials designed to put scientific findings into action and to encourage practical applications of developmental science to practice and policy.

Abstract
The phrase “evidence-based practices” represents a long-sought after goal of developmental science—namely, moving research findings into practice. In fact, many of the most exciting scientific discoveries about what promotes children’s health and safety, educational and intellectual achievement, social and emotional development, and personal well-being are not popularly understood or fully applied to improve children’s lives. In this presentation, I review major findings from our research that focuses on implementing scientific findings in a wide range of community-based settings, including public schools, child care centers, family care homes, Head Start programs, residential treatment settings, early intervention programs for children with disabilities, and prenatal and well-child clinics. I underscore the importance and availability of opportunities to establish and sustain partnerships to conduct research to test real-world applications of scientific findings, and present some of the strategies that have prevented as well as helped to solve serious threats to conducting rigorous community-based trials and to promoting the use of new findings to inform both practice and policy. Finally, I seek to identify an emerging set of principles about effective application of evidence-based practices. At the heart of this presentation is an effort to synthesize what we know about two closely related topics: Why we are not doing a better job of fully applying scientific findings to benefit children and why we continue to do things that we know do not work.

Presentation 2
Evidence-Based Practice in Child and Adolescent Mental Health: Recent Evidence and the Shape of the Future
Speaker: John Weisz, Judge Baker Children’s Center, Harvard University Medical School

Biographical Sketch
John Weisz is President and CEO of the Judge Baker Children’s Center, and Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School. He grew up in Mississippi and received his B.A. from Mississippi College. After serving as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya, he studied at Yale University, where he received a Ph.D. in clinical and developmental psychology. Dr. Weisz was Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he served for a term as Director of the Graduate Program in Clinical Psychology and Director of the Psychology Clinic. After leaving UCLA, he was a faculty member at Cornell University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has served as President of the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology and as President of the International Society for the Study of Child and Adolescent Psychopathology. He is currently Director of the Network on Youth Mental Health, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. His written work includes books and articles focused primarily on youth problem behavior and disorders, cultural factors in development and dysfunction, and psychotherapy for children and adolescents. His most recent book is Psychotherapy for Children and Adolescents: Evidence-Based Treatments and Case Examples, published in 2004 by Cambridge University Press. His wife Jenny is a child advocate attorney. John and Jenny have four children.

Abstract
Across decades of research, empirically-tested psychotherapies have been developed for diverse child and adolescent mental health problems and disorders. Many of these therapies show respectable effects, with moderate specificity and holding power over time. This presentation will note some of the best-supported treatments emerging from a recent review of the evidence on anxiety, depression, ADHD, and conduct problems, highlighting strengths and limitations of the treatments and the evidence base on which they rest. Despite findings supporting these interventions, to date, relatively few are making their way into everyday clinical care. An analysis of reasons for slow dissemination suggests an agenda for future research, and helps convey a picture of what the evidence base and the treatments may look like in the years ahead. The presentation will focus, throughout, on the need to test interventions in real-world contexts and make tested interventions accessible and effective in community and practice settings. A case is made that connecting the science and practice of child and adolescent mental health intervention will be good for science, good for practice, and good for children and their families.

Presentation 3
Holding Fast to That Which Is Good: The Campbell Collaboration and Related Systematic Review Efforts
Speaker: Robert Boruch, University of Pennsylvania

Biographical Sketch
Robert Boruch is University Trustee Chair Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the Statistics Department (Wharton School) at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Boruch's research has focused on the use of randomized trials in education, crime and justice, and social welfare, and on the development of international networks, such as the Campbell Collaboration, and on national efforts, such as the What Works Clearinghouse, in generating systematic reviews of evidence.

Abstract
The presentation will cover recent activity of the international Campbell Collaboration (http://www.campbellcollaboration.org) and related efforts to generate systematic reviews of evidence about what works, what does not, and what harms. The Campbell Collaboration aims at reviews of evidence on effectiveness of interventions in welfare, crime and justice, and education. Campbell's older sibling is the Cochrane Collaboration in health care (http://www.cochrane.org). Campbell collaborators have been assisting, the What Works Clearinghouse of the Institute for Education Sciences, and others in government-based efforts to review evidence and identify evidence-based interventions, and provide such information to people in the interest of informing decisions.