Global impact

Welcome to this issue of the International Journal of School & Educational Psychology (IJSEP). As the official journal of the International School Psychology Association (ISPA), our aim is to reach a broad-based readership of practitioners and researchers working in the best interest of our children around the globe. In this issue, we include a range of articles addressing issues pertaining to practices in five different countries. Exploring social justice in school psychology research, Emily Graybill and colleagues (2018) espouse the importance of improving our research practices “understanding power differences between participants and researchers” (p. 87) and ensuring the best practices for all involved. They conclude with calling up researchers and practitioners to not only ensure social justice in research projects but also to implement just and fair practices in schools.

Moving into the global arena, the other articles in this issue focus on school and educational psychology research and practice in Japan, Ireland, Turkey and Iran to give us a glimpse at various phenomena also relevant to other parts of the world. School bullying has long been a phenomenon that worries practitioners worldwide, prompting them to find ways to deal with the emotional responses of victims. With the advances in social media, cyberbullying has provided a new context for both public and private bullying to escalate. Aoyama and colleagues (2018) examined the emotional responses of Japanese middle school students when faced with public and private bullying, concluding that context and incident visibility should be considered “when developing educational programs for bullying prevention” (p. 90). Somewhat related is the psycho-emotional experiences of school-going youth in boarding schools in Turkey, where Atli (2018) used a qualitative research design to explore the challenges and constraints that school counsellors face when working in these schools. Atli concluded that, among other aspects, collaboration with parents seem to be the biggest problem, particularly in view of the fact that homesickness is a central concern for the youth under their care and having to live away from home for their schooling. Expanding our understanding of Turkish school students’ needs, Siyez (2018) also investigated the effect of “perceived social support from teachers, expectation of academic achievement, school control, and gender on anger dimensions” (p. 112) in an attempt to advise practitioners regarding school-related variables associated with anger.

The last two articles address a somewhat different aspect of the school and educational psychologist’s practice in that they focus on language learning. In Iran, youth is engaged in learning English as foreign language at a non-profit language institute, and Ghahari and Farokhnia (2018) explored the outcomes of a quasi-experimental design evaluating different types of assessment. Their study has pedagogical implications for how peer assessment and teacher assessment could help learners progress and achieve the expected learning outcomes. On the other hand, first-language learners with and without dyslexia were the subjects in James and Hannah’s (2018) study exploring the validity of a spelling and grammar waiver in the school leaving certificate examinations in Ireland. The authors claim that this kind of accommodation gives the dyslexic youth an unfair advantage over their non-affected counterparts, and that the waiver practice in Ireland should be re-examined in order to be more reasonable to both groups—that is, those diagnosed with dyslexia and granted the waiver, and those who do not suffer from this learning disability.

All the articles in this issue have been solicited and accepted under the auspices of Prof. Rik Carl D’Amato’s editorship of IJSEP, for which we thank him greatly. I am honoured to extend a word of thanks to him for his tenure and for collecting such an interesting selection of empirical articles using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. I also wish to thank the many eminent international and multidisciplinary reviewers who helped improve each of the manuscripts with their constructive reviews. Last but not least, I want to invite the readers of our great journal—that is, the scholars, practitioners and researchers with an interest in the success of children, youth and families in academics and in life—to send us your best articles, read and cite the articles in this and other issues, and to share in building up IJSEP as a worthwhile resource for psychological and evidence-based practices in schools and communities around the world. It is the only way we can make a global impact!