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This study contributes to ongoing scholarship at the nexus of translational research, education reform, and the developmental and prevention sciences. It reports 2-year experimental impacts of a universal, integrated school-based intervention in social-emotional learning and literacy development on children's social-emotional, behavioral, and academic functioning. The study employed a school-randomized, experimental design with 1,184 children in 18 elementary schools. Children in the intervention schools showed improvements across several domains: self-reports of hostile attributional bias, aggressive interpersonal negotiation strategies, and depression, and teacher reports of attention skills, and aggressive and socially competent behavior. In addition, there were effects of the intervention on children's math and reading achievement for those identified by teachers at baseline at highest behavioral risk. These findings are interpreted in light of developmental cascades theory and lend support to the value of universal, integrated interventions in the elementary school period for promoting children's social-emotional and academic skills.

In this article, we discuss the need for and value of an integrated developmental intervention science in low- and middle-income countries (LAMICs), and the extent to which this integration of basic developmental science has influenced research on child and youth development interventions in these countries. We also consider how a global developmental science can be advanced by capitalizing on the opportunities provided by cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, experimental, and mixed methods approaches. We argue that designing and evaluating human developmental interventions in LAMICs present an opportunity for both research and policy. Testing contextualized developmental approaches through rigorously evaluated interventions yields the promise of finding more powerful and scalable solutions that can reach more children and youth worldwide. Moreover, a theoretically rich and methodologically rigorous understanding of how interventions effect change in diverse countries and contexts can contribute to the development of a truly global developmental science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this longitudinal study, the proportion of time preschoolers directed their attention away from rewarding stimuli during a delay-of-gratification task was positively associated with efficiency (greater speed without reduced accuracy) at responding to targets in a go/no-go task more than 10 years later. The overall findings suggest that preschoolers' ability to effectively direct their attention away from tempting aspects of the rewards in a delay-of-gratification task may be a developmental precursor for the ability to perform inhibitory tasks such as the go/no-go task years later. Because performance on the go/no-go task has previously been characterized as involving activation of fronto-striatal regions, the present findings also suggest that performance in the delay-of-gratification task may serve as an early marker of individual differences in the functional integrity of this circuitry.