What can be done to improve learning outcomes for the millions of children growing up in conflict-affected societies and enrolled in under-resourced school systems? How can the global community safeguard the right of every child, including those in crisis settings, to a quality education and position them to heal, learn and thrive? What are the best interventions that achieve the greatest outcomes for the most children in humanitarian contexts?

Early Childhood Development in Humanitarian Crises: South Sudanese Refugees in Uganda, Sweta Shah’s comprehensive book on early childhood development (ECD) in humanitarian crises, benefits from, and is likely to draw criticism for, its stated desire to appeal to a wide audience. Any part of this expansive work could itself be a book, which runs the risk of leaving some readers wishing for more on a particular topic. It also makes this an excellent text for those looking to be introduced fairly quickly to a wide range of issues of critical importance to improving the long-term outcomes of the tens of millions of children who are currently displaced from their homes due to conflict and disaster, and the countless more likely to be so in the future.

This paper critically reviews the opportunities and challenges in designing and conducting actionable research on the learning and development of children in conflict- and crisis-affected countries. We approached our review through two perspectives championed by Edward Zigler: (a) child development and social policy and (b) developmental psychopathology in context. The aim of the work was to answer the following questions: What works to enhance children's learning and development in such contexts? By what mechanisms? For whom? Under what conditions? How do experiences and conditions of crisis affect the basic processes of children's typical development? The review is based on a research–practice partnership started in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2010 and expanded to research in Niger and Lebanon in 2016. The focus of the research is on the impact of Healing Classrooms (a set of classroom practices) and Healing Classrooms Plus (an additional set of targeted social and emotional learning activities), developed by the International Rescue Committee, on children's academic outcomes and social and emotional learning. We sought to extract lessons from this decade of research for building a global developmental science for action. Special attention is paid to the importance of research–practice partnerships, conceptual frameworks, measurement and methodology. We conclude by highlighting several essential features of a global developmental science for action.

War, disasters, trafficking and immigration are tearing millions of children from their parents all around the world. A psychologist explores how to help them recover.

Parent–child separation occurs for many reasons, both involuntary and voluntary. We review the effects on children and youth of parent–child separation due to several of the most common reasons that are responsible for the growth in this family circumstance worldwide. These include early institutionalization; war, persecution, and conflict; separation during asylum; trafficking; conscription into armed conflict; and being left behind when parents migrate for economic or other reasons. Overall, the effects of parent–child separation are consistently negative on children's social-emotional development, well-being, and mental health. They are more severe when the separation is prolonged or accompanied by other forms of deprivation or victimization. Mitigating and protective factors include earlier stable family placement in the case of early institutionalization, parent–child communication and parenting quality, and community support in the host community. We conclude with an evaluation of group, school-based, and community-based interventions for children and youth affected by parent–child separation.

During school year 2016-2017, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) delivered Learning in a Healing Classroom after-school programming to support Syrian refugee children’s learning outcomes and retention in Lebanese public schools. We found that access to Healing Classrooms programming significantly improved students’ reading and math skills, as well as reduced the likelihood of interpreting interactions with peers as hostile in intent, after the first four months of program implementation.

Exposure to community violence is thought to create risk for the social and emotional development of children, including those children living in low-income, conflict-affected countries. In the absence of other types of community resources, schools may be one of the few community resources that can help buffer children from the negative effects of community violence exposure. We sampled 8,300 students ranging in age from 6–18 years in 123 schools from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to examine whether and how two distinct dimensions of positive school climate can protect two key features of children's social-emotional development in the presence of community violence. Multi-level models tested the hypothesis that students’ perceptions of a positive school climate moderated the relation between community violence and self-reported mental health problems and peer victimization. Findings support the hypothesis. Specifically, a positive school climate protected against mental health problems and peer victimization in the presence of high community violence. Students who experienced high community violence and a negative school climate generally demonstrated the worst development. We find complex interactions between the dimensions of school climate and exposure to violence on student social-emotional development that highlight the salience of children's contexts for developmental studies in low-income countries. We use dynamic developmental systems theory and differential impact to discuss the dual potential of schools as a buffer against the effects of violence or as a source of compounded risk.

During school year 2016-2017, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) delivered Healing Classrooms remedial tutoring programming and additional low-cost, targeted Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) (SEL) interventions to children in Diffa, a region in Niger affected by recurrent Boko Haram attacks. We found that, after twenty-two weeks of program implementation, access to Healing Classrooms tutoring significantly improved students’ reading and math skills, and adding targeted SEL interventions to Healing Classrooms tutoring improved children’s overall school grades. However, we found little evidence of direct impacts of the additional targeted SEL strategies on children’s social-emotional outcomes.

An unprecedented half of the world’s 57 million out of school children live in conflict-affected countries, and 50% of children of primary-school-age are not attending school. In addition, the unauthorized status of many refugees and migrants worldwide is associated with experiences of social exclusion as access to employment and social services are often unavailable or constrained by host-country governments. Children and youth affected by unauthorized or refugee status are also often excluded from services to support healthy development and learning. This chapter presents a process-oriented developmental framework to guide the development and evaluation of interventions that can buffer the effects of social and political upheaval, displacement, and refugee and unauthorized status on children and youth's development. Rigorous evaluations, showing how programs mitigate the risks of displacement or refugee or unauthorized status, could yield great benefits for the fields of humanitarian aid and refugee and migration policy, making the relative dearth of such evidence even more stunning. This chapter reviews the existing literature from rigorous evaluations of interventions to address these issues, discusses the challenge of measurement of risk and protective factors in these contexts with particular sensitivity to cultural variation, as well as how to address cultural factors in the development and evaluation of interventions. The chapter concludes with specific methodological recommendations for a sound research agenda to further improve our understanding of risk and resilience in development of children and youth affected by war, displacement, and refugee or unauthorized status.

With support from Dubai Cares during the school year 2016-2017, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) delivered Learning in a Healing Classroom remedial tutoring programming to support local and internally displaced Nigerien children and refugee Nigerian children’s learning outcomes and retention in public schools in Niger. We found that, after twenty-two weeks of program implementation, (1) access to Healing Classrooms programming significantly improved students’ reading and math skills, and (2) adding low-cost, targeted Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) interventions to Healing Classrooms improved students’ overall school grades as well.

Young children living in conditions of war, disaster, and displacement are at high risk for developmental difficulties that can follow them throughout their lives. While there is robust evidence supporting the need for early childhood development (ECD) in humanitarian settings, implementation of ECD programming remains sparse, largely due to the lack of evidence of how and why these programs can improve outcomes in humanitarian settings. In order to build the evidence base for ECD in humanitarian settings, we review the current state of implementation research for ECD programming (targeting children 0–8) in humanitarian settings, through a literature review and a series of key informant interviews. Drawing from existing frameworks of implementation research and the findings from our analysis, we present a framework for ECD implementation research in humanitarian settings and propose an agenda for future research.

We present here as the overarching “promising practice” a research-practice partnership dedicated to iterative cycles of action and research. In 2016-2017, the IRC delivered non-formal retention-focused tutoring support, also known as remedial programming, to 6,400 children enrolled in public schools in Lebanon and Niger using its Learning in a Healing Classroom (LIHC) program. LIHC is an evidence-based approach to providing reading and math courses in safe and supportive learning environments. Sites were additionally randomized to embed low-cost, targeted social-emotional learning (SEL) interventions into the curriculum. TIES/ NYU then conducted a site-randomized trial to provide the first rigorous evidence of whether and how non-formal, SEL-based retention support education programs can bolster refugee children’s ability to succeed in formal education systems, as well as some of the first evidence globally on how targeted SEL practices can be embedded in curriculum to support children’s holistic learning and development. We share the lessons learned from both the interventions and from the partnership, focusing on the work in Lebanon.

Improving children's learning and development in conflict-affected countries is critically important for breaking the intergenerational transmission of violence and poverty. Yet there is currently a stunning lack of rigorous evidence as to whether and how programs to improve learning and development in conflict-affected countries actually work to bolster children's academic learning and socioemotional development. This study tests a theory of change derived from the fields of developmental psychopathology and social ecology about how a school-based universal socioemotional learning program, the International Rescue Committee's Learning to Read in a Healing Classroom (LRHC), impacts children's learning and development. The study was implemented in three conflict-affected provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and employed a cluster-randomized waitlist control design to estimate impact. Using multilevel structural equation modeling techniques, we found support for the central pathways in the LRHC theory of change. Specifically, we found that LRHC differentially impacted dimensions of the quality of the school and classroom environment at the end of the first year of the intervention, and that in turn these dimensions of quality were differentially associated with child academic and socioemotional outcomes. Future implications and directions are discussed.