With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Rudd Foundation, researchers at the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Health developed WellSAT, which allows users to assess the quality of their school district’s written wellness policy.
Month: October 2016
Guidelines for Community Partnership Research
Prepared by the Community Research Alliance (CRA), with significant input from the Institute for Community Research, faculty of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Farmington, CT and the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford, CT, with support from the UCONN Connecticut Institute for Clinical and Translational Science (CICATS) Guidelines-Executive Summary PDF
SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL SCHOOL CLIMATE
The social and emotional climate of a school can impact student engagement, relationships, and learning. A positively-focused school climate promotes a safe and supporting learning environment.
PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT
The school physical environment includes the building and its contents the land areas encompassing and surrounding it. The everyday physical condition (e.g. ventilation, moisture, temperature, lighting, noise), is important as well as considerations regarding infrastructure that addresses natural (e.g. fire, wind, flood) and human-caused (e.g. chemical, terrorist, biological) threats.
PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND PHYSICAL ACTIVITY
Healthy school environments offer many opportunities for physical activity throughout the day. These activities can include a comprehensive program to address student learning (i.e., education) and practice (i.e., activity) of skills needed to maintain physically active lifestyles through childhood and into adulthood.
NUTRITION ENVIRONMENT AND SERVICES
The nutrition environment in schools facilitates healthy eating by providing appropriate food choices, education, and messages. This environment extends to all school places in which food and beverage access is available (e.g. cafeterias, vending machines, classrooms). Nutrition services in schools provide meals that meet government nutrition standards and the school community supports a healthy nutrition […]
HEALTH SERVICES
Health services in schools work to prevent health problems as well as intervene with existing conditions. For example, parent and student education exists along with management of chronic conditions and emergency care. Care coordination and communication with outside providers is an important role for health services.
HEALTH EDUCATION
Health education includes a combination of planned learning opportunities to help students make positive health decisions. High-quality instruction engages students across a developmental continuum in learning about, adopting, and promoting healthy behaviors – see for example the Michigan Model for Health. Health education includes school-wide to individualized opportunities, identified based on needs of particular contexts, […]
FAMILY ENGAGEMENT
Family-school partnerships are essential to supporting the learning and health needs of students. It is the shared responsibility of both to work together across the lifespan in facilitating successful development of students.
EMPLOYEE WELLNESS
Fostering health in the workplace results in not only healthy school employees but also supports student health as healthy employees are more productive and better able to do their job in attending to student needs. An effective employee wellness approach includes programs, policies, benefits, and supports in order to address health through personalized health programs […]
COUNSELING, PSYCHOLOGICAL, AND SOCIAL SERVICES
These services support the social, emotional, behavioral, and mental health of students, and extend along a continuum of prevention through intervention strategies that identify and address barriers to learning. School employed professionals such as school psychologists, school counselors, and school social workers provide direct services to individual students and families as well as classes and […]
COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
Groups, organizations, and businesses within the community can be important anchors to a school, creating partnerships, sharing resources, and volunteering to support student learning and health. Not only can schools benefit from these connections, but these benefits can be reciprocal such as when schools share facilities with the community (e.g. school-based health centers, meeting spaces, […]
Husky Sport
Funded by USDA SNAP-Ed, local foundations, AmeriCorps and private donations, Husky Sport is a sport based youth development program operating as a community-campus partnership between Hartford’s North End and UConn’s Neag School of Education. Husky Sport emphasizes nutritional education, physical activity, transferrable life skills, and academic enrichment with K-12 grade students both in school and […]
NEEDs2
Funded by the National Center for Education Research, Institute for Education Sciences, the National Exploration of Emotional/Behavioral Detection in School Screening (NEEDs2) project aims to understand if and how social, emotional, and behavioral screeners are being used in schools, and what factors influence use.
Nutrition Policies and Practices in Early Care and Education at the Rudd Center
Current Rudd Center projects funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Healthy Eating Research program include an evaluation of Community Eligibility Provision (of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act) effects on academic and health outcomes and an assessment of the updated Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) meal patterns in child care centers. For more […]
Effectiveness of Brain Breaks to Improve Physical Literacy
The overall objective is to establish the preliminary effectiveness of a video-based exercise intervention, or “BrainErgizersTM,” that can be incorporated into the school day as a classroom physical activity brain break. For more information, contact: Lindsay DiStefano
Low Cost Portable Device for Breastfeeding Diagnostics
Dr. Ruth Lucas and Dr. Bin Feng have created a device that allows for measurement of an infants’ sucking microstructure during breast and bottle feeding in the home setting. A Connecticut Bioscience Pipeline Grant will allow researchers to test the device in home settings for reliability, tolerance and acceptance during feeding. For more information, contact […]
Think about the Link Project
Funded through the UConn OVPR’s Research Excellence Program, the Neag Foundation, and individual donors, this project facilitates school efforts in integrating health and learning. Schools can enhance their support systems by incorporating the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) model in decision-making across academic, social, emotional, behavioral, and physical domains of functioning. Project materials […]
New Haven Register
Clifford Beers Program Turns Stress and Trauma into Positive Outcomes – October 3, 2016