Youth and caregiver reports of mental health issues differ

 

Both perspectives needed

Youth and caregivers frequently disagree about psychiatric diagnoses, and relying on only one informant may substantially influence which mental health problems are identified

Psychiatric assessments of children and adolescents commonly incorporate reports from both youth and their caregivers. However, they may identify substantially different mental health problems, potentially influencing diagnosis, treatment planning, and estimates of psychiatric disorder prevalence. 

A new study by researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and their colleagues examined the extent to which youth and caregiver reports differed across a broad range of psychiatric diagnoses from late childhood through middle adolescence. Previous studies have focused on a limited number of disorders, like depression or anxiety, at single points in time. The study was published on November 11, 2026 in JAMA Psychiatry.

The study measured how often youth and caregivers agree or disagree on psychiatric diagnoses and clinical problems, and how that agreement varies by diagnosis and developmental stage.

The research analyzed reports from 11,868 youth and their caregivers from age 9 to age 17 as part of the UC San Diego-coordinated Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, the largest long-term study of children’s brain and behavioral development in the country. 

Youth and their caregivers were asked the same diagnostic questions during separate clinical interviews. The researchers derived a mental health diagnosis based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5) from each youth’s own report and each caregiver’s report. They then compared those reports and tracked how much they overlapped for each diagnosis across different developmental stages.

The analysis found:

• Disagreement was the norm: When a diagnosis was reported, it came from only one informant, not both, in approximately 65% to 98% of cases, depending on the psychiatric diagnoses and developmental stage.
• Youth were more likely to report major depressive disorder, sleep problems, substance use, suicidal thoughts and attempts and nonsuicidal self-injury. Teens reported depression more often than caregivers did as they got older.
• Caregivers were more likely to report conduct disorders, eating disorders and generalized and social anxiety disorders. These gaps were widest at younger ages and narrowed as teens got older.
• Agreement generally improved across development stages, but remained limited, suggesting that discrepancies persist throughout adolescence.

The findings highlight the importance of obtaining information directly from adolescents rather than relying exclusively on caregiver reports for adolescent psychiatric assessment, according to corresponding author Laika D. Aguinaldo, PhD, MSW, assistant professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

“Teens were more likely to disclose private, internal experiences, but parents were more likely to report more externally visible mental health problems,” she said.

The study has implications for understanding the prevalence of psychiatric disorders in young people and for clinical screening practices.

“If we're really thinking about suicidal thoughts, self-harm, substance use and sleep, most parents don't actually know that their kids are experiencing these mental health problems, which is why we need to ask both the teen and the parent,” Aguinaldo added. “If you only ask one, you might miss the opportunity to identify a young person who needs help and to intervene early.”

Future work will investigate factors associated with youth-caregiver discrepancies and whether these differences influence mental health service access and clinical outcomes.

Read the full study: “Youth-caregiver discordance in psychiatric diagnosis and clinical problems in the ABCD study”

As AI moves into the classroom don’t let it bypass teachers’ professional judgement

As universities race to adopt AI tools, a new paper in Frontiers of Digital Education warns that the technology is quietly reshaping the conditions under which teachers make professional judgements—and that without deliberate pedagogical design, it risks making teaching “technically active but normatively thin.”

The conceptual paper, by Ying Ji and Neil Mercer of the University of Cambridge, introduces the concept of the judgement space: the pedagogical condition in which professional judgement is not only exercised but articulated, examined, and sustained through interaction. In AI-supported higher education, they argue, this space becomes a three-party condition, as AI-generated evaluations enter the conversation alongside teacher and student.
The question is not whether AI can evaluate student work—it increasingly can, the authors write. “The question is whether teaching is designed so that AI’s evaluative outputs become material for professional deliberation rather than a substitute for it.”
Drawing on educational philosopher Gert Biesta’s account of education’s three purposes—qualification (knowledge and skills), socialisation (becoming part of disciplinary communities), and subjectification (developing as an autonomous person)—the authors identify a persistent epistemic asymmetry. AI readily captures qualification-domain evidence such as correct answers, error patterns, and performance metrics, whose quality criteria can be defined in advance. Evidence of socialisation and subjectification—whether a student’s hesitation signals genuine struggle, whether a challenge to a peer reflects real engagement—depends on normative, contextual judgements that only a teacher who knows the student, the discipline, and the purposes can make.
This asymmetry, they argue, is not a technological limitation to be solved by better AI, but reflects the nature of those domains, where what counts as quality is itself a normative question. The result: An evidence base systematically weighted toward what is easiest to measure, narrowing the judgement space even without removing the teacher’s authority.
The authors cite evidence consistent with this concern, including a randomised experiment in which learners using generative AI improved essay scores without corresponding gains in knowledge acquisition or transfer—a pattern the study’s authors termed “metacognitive laziness.”
To counteract this, Ji and Mercer advance the dialogic inquiry triangle, a framework developed in school-based practitioner research, extended here to AI-supported higher education. It structures interaction across three dimensions: inquiry INTO dialogue (building analytical capacity to interrogate AI outputs), THROUGH dialogue (collaborative deliberation through “exploratory talk”), and FOR dialogue (orienting toward independent judgement). From this, the authors derive six structural principles for teacher–student–AI interaction—for example, that AI provides data for professional judgement rather than definitive evaluation, and that teaching should preserve occasions for productive struggle rather than automatically resolving difficulty—along with a Professional Judgement Audit for faculty development.
The authors are explicit that the framework is conceptual. The judgement space construct, the structural principles, and the audit are theoretically derived and remain untested in higher education; the triangle has so far been examined only in school contexts. They set out a three-stage research agenda to empirically investigate the judgement space, test which principles matter most across disciplines, and validate the audit as a reflective tool. They also acknowledge that dialogic practices carry cultural and linguistic specificity, and that highly standardised institutions may offer teachers little discretion to create such conditions.
Faculty development in AI-supported environments must extend beyond equipping individual teachers with AI competencies, the authors conclude. “It must address the pedagogical conditions under which professional judgement can function—conditions that can either be enriched or impoverished by how AI is positioned.”

 

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Journal

Frontiers of Digital Education

DOI

10.1007/s44366-026-0107-x 

Peer Influence in College Applications

 This paper studies how exposure to peers affects college application behavior using neighbors who attend different high schools to mitigate concerns about common shocks. Using granular classroom-level data, the authors find that exposure to peers who have applied to a program increases application rates. Consistent with an information mechanism, there is no additional effect of peers who are admitted. In counterfactuals, the effect is large enough to close urban-rural gaps and gender gaps in applications to selective college programs. 

Study suggests there is no ‘right’ way to teach statistics, giving flexibility to educators

A new study has investigated whether challenges faced by educators in teaching statistics could be reduced by changing how it is taught and revealed that there is no ‘right way,’ giving flexibility to educators to choose how best to teach the subject.

Students studying subjects ranging from psychology and medicine to law are often required to learn statistics, but many find the subject challenging. Two common difficulties are understanding statistical concepts and experiencing anxiety about statistics.

Experts from the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham have published a new study in Psychology Teaching Review that explored these challenges and whether changing the order in which people encounter equations and worked examples, and the type of example used, affected their learning. The findings suggest that the order and example type did not affect either statistics understanding or anxiety.  This means educators may have considerable flexibility in deciding how to introduce statistical concepts such as standard deviation.

Dr Kieran Lyon from the School of Psychology is lead author on the paper, he said: “We performed this study to find out whether changing the order of teaching materials and the examples used would reduce statistics anxiety and improve understanding.  Neither order or example type affected these outcomes.  This is good news, because it means that either order and example type is equally effective, and educations can choose without worrying that it will negatively affect students' experience or grades.”

Statistics is often introduced through lectures that present abstract equations before students practice applying them to example data. The researchers investigated whether putting the worked example first, or changing the example type, could make statistics easier to understand and less anxiety-provoking.

The researchers conducted an online experiment focused on standard deviation, a measure of how spread-out numbers are around their average. Participants learned the equation for standard deviation and completed a worked example involving calculating the standard deviation of a set of numbers using Microsoft Excel.

The study tested two different teaching orders: equation-first, where participants learned the equation before completing the worked example; and example-first, where participants completed the worked example before learning the equation.

The researchers also compared two types of worked example. One used real-world data on life expectancy from the United Nations, while the other used a deliberately fun and fictional scenario involving the heights of aliens from another planet.

The researchers found that neither the order in which the material was presented nor the type of example used affected participants’ understanding of statistics or their statistics anxiety.

Nikki Dean Marshall, Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology is co-author on the study and added: “Many students approach statistics with anxiety, so educators are always looking for ways to make the subject more accessible. Our findings suggest there is no single 'right' way to teach statistics. Whether teaching begins or ends with equations or whether examples are real-world or simulated, people appear to learn just as effectively which is great news as it gives educators the flexibility to adapt their teaching to the needs of their learners.”

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Journal

Psychology Teaching Review

DOI

10.53841/bpsptr.2026.32.2.21 

Autistic children benefitted from online literacy instruction during COVID pandemic

 Despite many obstacles presented by students being at home during COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, the autistic children involved in this research project still showed significant progress through online instruction.

Flinders University’s Professor Joanne Arciuli, who led the feasibility study, says that developing useful tools for this area of literacy teaching plugs a gap in autistic care.

“Children with autism present with highly diverse and non-uniform reading profiles, with some experiencing difficulties with reading comprehension more than reading accuracy skills,” says Professor Arciuli.

She points to 2021 research of 26 studies involving more than 1200 autistic children, which showed that word reading scores were higher on average than reading comprehension scores.

While the feasibility study was originally designed to test the effects of small-group face-to-face literacy instruction on the reading skills of autistic children in an area of relative sociodemographic inequity, these plans changed due to stay-at-home orders issued mid-way through the study – from group-based to one-to-one instruction, and from in person to online delivery.

“It ended up being a steep learning curve to conduct a trial in an area of socioeconomic disadvantage in Western Sydney during a global pandemic,” says Professor Arciuli.

“The study continued because we had an ethical duty to continue providing services to research participants, so we moved instruction online via telepractice with the interactive web application ABRACADABRA – and this unexpected change offered a unique opportunity to explore the effects of literacy instruction under the same ‘real world’ conditions impacting clinical settings at the time.

“Autistic child participants in our two instruction groups did make some gains in reading abilities compared to a control group, which is interesting because of the mandated disruptions and complex personal and family issues experienced by our participants.”

The outcomes underline the value of a tool such as ABRACADABRA, a free online interactive web application with 33 activities, designed to support children's development in alphabetics (phonemic awareness and phonics), reading fluency, reading comprehension (vocabulary and comprehension strategies) and writing (spelling).

Developed in 2002 by the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP) at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, the modular ABRACADABRA program can provide highly individualised literacy instruction.

The outcomes produced a surprise. “We hypothesised initially that children in instruction conditions would achieve gains in their reading accuracy and reading comprehension skills, and that children participating in shared book reading activities would achieve greater gains in reading comprehension than children who did not participate in these. However, children who participated in the intervention conditions made significant gains compared with the control group.”

Professor Arciuli says the application of this research could have far-reaching benefits for telepractice delivery of literacy instruction, especially for children with autism in rural or remote areas who cannot access face-to-face instruction.

The research – “ABRACADABRA literacy instruction delivered by speech-language pathologists to children with autism during the COVID-19 pandemic”, by Annemarie Murphy, Benjamin Bailey, Robert Savage, Rauno Parrila and Joanne Arciuli – has been published in the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. DOI:10.1080/17549507.2025.2555990.

Online communication with different types of friends affects teens’ mental well-being

 In a study in Child and Adolescent Mental Health, researchers found that online communication with friends was associated with adolescents’ mental well-being, but patterns varied by both frequency of communication and the type of friendship.

For the study, investigators analyzed responses from 3,034 15-year-olds participating in the 2017/2018 and 2021/2022 Swedish Health Behaviour in School-aged Children surveys.

Intense online communication with close friends and larger groups was associated with better mental well-being. Moderate or intense communication with online-only friends was linked with poorer well-being, particularly among girls and adolescents who perceived their families as less wealthy.

“Amid growing concern about young people’s online lives, our findings suggest that it is not only how much adolescents communicate online that matters, but also who they communicate with,” said corresponding author Associate Professor Viviane S. Straatmann, PhD, of the Department of Public Health Sciences at Stockholm University, in Sweden. “This highlights the importance of considering the social context of online interactions when discussing their implications for adolescent well-being.”

URL upon publication: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/camh.70139

Anxiety over climate change affects college students

 

College undergraduates are anxious about climate change, with many feeling powerless and frustrated about Earth’s future, yet resources to help students cope are in short supply, according to new interdisciplinary University of Utah research. The sentiment isn’t limited to students studying the environment.

“They’re not alone,” said Jennifer Follstad Shah, associate professor in the university’s School of Environment, Society & Sustainability. “There’s a lot of students feeling that way, and likely a lot of adults feeling that way.” Her findings appear in the journal Sustainability.

The research led by Follstad Shah and other Utah faculty surveyed 547 University of Utah students about their emotional responses to climate change and the factors that influenced their feelings. More than half reported frequently feeling powerless or frustrated.

The team released a companion study last year based on the same survey data investigating ways students cope with climate anxiety. Led by Monika Lohani, associate professor of psychology, this study found that students found relief by spending time in nature, hanging out with friends and spending time with pets, engaging in self-care, changing their behavior to lessen their climate impact and learning more about climate change.

“The knowledge is empowering them to understand the intricacies. That makes them not feel hopeless,” said Lohani, a research associate with the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU). “All the progress in terms of technology that has come out to combat the carbon footprint actually made them feel more hopeful.”

Both studies argue that universities should expand support services to help students manage the emotional burdens associated with potentially destructive environmental change driven by reliance on fossil fuels.

Drivers of climate anxiety

Researchers surveyed students enrolled in three environmental studies courses and one communication course.

Students rated how often climate change made them feel certain emotions. In the study led by Follstad Shah, powerlessness and frustration were the most reported, with 54% of students reporting that they felt powerless frequently or a lot, and 55% said the same about frustration.

Just 4% of students said they felt hopeful “A lot,” though 40% reported at least some hope when other response categories were counted. Students who reported more general anxiety also tended to experience greater anxiety over climate. The researchers cautioned that the findings do not establish causal connections between climate change and anxiety.

“It may be that climate anxiety is a contributor to general anxiety, as well as the converse,” Follstad Shah said.

Students majoring in environmental studies reported higher climate anxiety than other students, even when they had similar levels of general anxiety. However, a student’s major was not a significant predictor once the researchers considered other factors, such as how often students encountered climate information, whether they considered climate change a personal issue and their political views.

Students who identified climate change as a top personal concern and who held more liberal political views tended to report greater levels of climate anxiety. Exposure to climate change information in class and online was also associated with anxiety, while information from friends, family and co-workers was not.

Lohani’s paper documented “adaptive” and “maladaptive” responses students have to the climate crisis. Some students said worry over climate made them shut down. One wrote, “Sometimes I just don’t feel like doing anything at all because it makes me so anxious.”

“People, often a majority, don’t know what to do with it,” Lohani said. “That is problematic for many reasons. Those who are overwhelmed, they might be catastrophizing or using avoidance or distraction, which ultimately is not good for their well-being, or efforts to address the climate change crisis. Those who are apathetic towards it, that is not bad for their well-being in the short run, but ultimately it is affecting them and their community.”

Supporting students burdened with climate anxiety

Follstad Shah and Lohani argued universities should expand mental health resources to address climate anxiety more directly.

Surveyed students told researchers that they want more opportunities to discuss climate change with peers and mentors. Follstad Shah and Lohani both highlighted the Good Grief Network, co-founded by LaUra Schmidt, a 2014 graduate of Utah’s Environmental Humanities program. This nonprofit harnesses peer support to help people and communities experiencing distress from social and ecological injustices.

The researchers encouraged students to get involved by asking faculty about climate research or internships. Students said they cope with anxiety by volunteering with advocacy groups. “Take part in environmentally friendly activities. Participate in community clean-up activities, volunteer for environmental issues, and join local projects,” said one student cited in Lohani’s paper.

Such experiences help students gain a sense of agency, according to the researchers. “Don’t be afraid to talk about it and let people know that you feel this way,” Follstad Shah said. “There’s power in those bonds.”

The researchers note that these findings represent just a snapshot in time and a specific undergraduate experience at a major university in an arid Western state where climate impacts are very noticeable. About 66% of respondents were female, 69% were White and 63% leaned left politically. The authors recommend follow-up studies that include students across more academic majors, backgrounds and universities to better understand the drivers of climate anxiety and how to help students manage it.

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The more recent study appeared Aug. 5 in the journal Sustainability under the title “Climate Anxiety Among Undergraduates at an R1 University in the United States.” I