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It's estimated that at any given point in time 10 to 20 percent of youth will suffer a mental health problem (O'Connell, Boat, & Warner, 2009). Why do we wait for serious problems to occur before taking action? The lack of preventative and promotional efforts for wellbeing have caused many psychologists and neuroscientists to turn to schooling as an obvious partner in giving people a better and more resilient start in life.

In a recent report of the US National Research Foundation (O'Connell, Boat, & Warner, 2009), numerous leading researchers from across the social sciences call on “the nation?its leaders, its mental health research and service provision agencies, its schools, its primary care medical systems, its community-based organizations, its child welfare and criminal justice systems?to make prevention of mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders and the promotion of mental health of young people a very high priority. By all realistic measures, no such priority exists today.”

Although the focus of the report is prevention, it also embarks on an analysis of mental health promotion through supportive families and schools?the very environments where young people develop the traits that will support their wellbeing and help them manage negative emotion and behavior throughout their lives. The report highlights evidence that the best strategies for preventing cognitive, emotional, and behavioral disorders are early intervention. It calls on the nation first to support those at risk, providing them with the best evidence-based interventions available, and then to promote the development of socioemotional skills in children and young adults more generally.

Just as modern economists and politicians are looking to “measure what matters,” educators are interested in “teaching what matters.” However, their discussions are understandably dominated by a focus on traditional academic subjects such as literacy, math, and science. Despite significant evidence that youth is the most critical window of opportunity for the development of attributes necessary to a happy stable life, only a small fraction of the efforts of educators, learning scientists, and education policymakers has been directed at developing psychological resources.

In fact, it is far more likely to find school-based peer-reviewed evaluations of wellbeing initiatives in journals such as Addiction than in education publications such as the Journal of Educational Psychology. The term wellbeing for example appears in only twenty articles in the latter, and half of them are from before 1950. The term mathematics, on the other hand, appears 795 times. Wellbeing was evidently not the focus of educational psychology in the second half of the twentieth century. Government funding, especially over the past decade, has encouraged a focus on what is collectively referred to as “STEM education,” consisting of science, technology, engineering, and math.

Without any doubt, society needs the scientists and engineers who will address the serious challenges of energy, climate change, and future technologies essential to our survival. And, of course, it's also critical that future generations gain the sophisticated understanding in these areas that will allow them to tackle twenty-first-century issues. But it seems that socioemotional skills?which are predictors of success in life?creative problem solving, and better decision making have been undervalued for far too long.

From the policy perspective, not only should adding wellbeing to the curriculum increase national wellbeing measures, it will also attend to other problems governments face, such as crime, poverty, drug abuse, and illness, all of which are frequently born from and exacerbated by ill-being. Intervening only once things are diagnosably bad requires expensive strategies such as long-term treatment and incarceration.

Despite the minimal attention given wellbeing in academic education research, new approaches geared at integrating socioemotional learning into the curriculum are emerging at the level of practice and within policy groups. For example, all children from kindergarten to sixth grade in New South Wales, Australia, follow a curriculum titled “Personal Development, Health, and Physical Education” that includes such modules as “Self and Relationships,” “Own Feelings and Empathy,” “Respect and Responsibility,” “Dealing with Conflict,” and “Diversity.” In the United States, the term social-emotional learning is used to describe similar curricula that aim to improve relationships and to develop emotional awareness and regulation, self-control, and healthy values. In the National Research Foundation report mentioned earlier, some of these programs were “shown to promote positive youth development while preventing mental health problems as well as substance abuse, violence, and other antisocial behaviour” (O'Connell, Boat, & Warner, 2009). Programs include:

• Inner Kids Program
• Inner Resilience Program
• Mindful Schools Program
• MindUP Program
• Still Quiet Place Program
• Stressed Teens Program
• Wellness Works in Schools Program

A RAND technical report titled Interventions to Improve Student Mental Health (Stein et al., 2012) provides an interesting review of the literature on such interventions written for policymakers in California. Prevention and early-intervention initiatives are grouped into those aiming to reduce stigma and discrimination, those on suicide prevention, and those on student mental health.

Others outside universities and governments have also recognized the importance of such research. The largest philanthropic organization in the world, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, recently funded a project led by neuroscientist Richard Davidson aimed at developing mindfulness in children.8 We discuss this project and other such schools projects in part II.

Of course, the difficulty in attending more seriously to this area of development in schools is compounded by a modern reliance on test scores as measures of student and teacher competence. Yet, remarkably, research shows that, in addition to making happier, safer, more resilient kids, these wellbeing programs also increase their academic performance. A recent meta-analysis (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011) of studies that included more than 200 schools (more than 270,000 students) showed that social and emotional learning programs lead to an impressive 11 percent gain in academic achievement.

This relationship is perhaps not surprising since positive emotions have been linked to better problem solving and enhanced creativity. Don Norman, among others, has highlighted the importance of designing for emotion (2005), much of which can be applied to the design of learning technologies. In Dorian's book Interface Design for Learning (2014), she looks at some of the emotions critical to learning and how design can support these emotions for better learning outcomes. For example, numerous studies have shown that positive emotions increase learning, creativity, problem-solving ability, and big-picture thinking. This work is related to Barbara Fredrickson's research on how positive emotions improve not only life experience, but also efficacy and resilience by increasing awareness, creativity, and exploratory behaviors (we look at the evolutionary importance of positive emotions in chapter 6).

As such, developing wellbeing in the learning environment also benefits from a better understanding of the dynamics of emotion involved in learning experiences as they occur. Educational psychology has tended to focus heavily on the cognitive aspects of learning rather than on the affective phenomena involved. Nevertheless, a number of researchers in the field have worked on certain areas of emotional experience, such as test anxiety, anger, frustration, and self-regulation (in both students and teachers) (Schutz & Pekrun, 2007). Among these emotions, test anxiety has received the most attention (particularly in the past few years in response to the increased reliance on standardized testing measures for evaluation in the United States).

The control-value theory of academic emotions (Pekrun, 2006) provides a way to analyze the antecedents and consequences of what students feel in learning situations. The theory assumes that appraisals of control (what is under a student's control and what is not) and values (how important the task is to a student) are essential to understanding the emotions felt in these activities (e.g., enjoyment, frustration, and boredom related to the learning activity as well as joy, hope, pride, anxiety, hopelessness, shame, and anger related to the outcome of the activity). There are clear overlaps with self-determination theory and its pillars of autonomy and competence. Education and wellbeing research undoubtedly have much to learn from each other, and we anticipate that they will begin to partner more consistently over the coming decade and will in all likelihood increasingly turn to technologists in their search for new tools to support investigation, learning, and wellbeing.

It's estimated that at any given point in time 10 to 20 percent of youth will suffer a mental health problem (O'Connell, Boat, & Warner, 2009). Why do we wait for serious problems to occur before taking action? The lack of preventative and promotional efforts for wellbeing have caused many psychologists and neuroscientists to turn to schooling as an obvious partner in giving people a better and more resilient start in life.

In a recent report of the US National Research Foundation (O'Connell, Boat, & Warner, 2009), numerous leading researchers from across the social sciences call on “the nation?its leaders, its mental health research and service provision agencies, its schools, its primary care medical systems, its community-based organizations, its child welfare and criminal justice systems?to make prevention of mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders and the promotion of mental health of young people a very high priority. By all realistic measures, no such priority exists today.”

Although the focus of the report is prevention, it also embarks on an analysis of mental health promotion through supportive families and schools?the very environments where young people develop the traits that will support their wellbeing and help them manage negative emotion and behavior throughout their lives. The report highlights evidence that the best strategies for preventing cognitive, emotional, and behavioral disorders are early intervention. It calls on the nation first to support those at risk, providing them with the best evidence-based interventions available, and then to promote the development of socioemotional skills in children and young adults more generally.

Just as modern economists and politicians are looking to “measure what matters,” educators are interested in “teaching what matters.” However, their discussions are understandably dominated by a focus on traditional academic subjects such as literacy, math, and science. Despite significant evidence that youth is the most critical window of opportunity for the development of attributes necessary to a happy stable life, only a small fraction of the efforts of educators, learning scientists, and education policymakers has been directed at developing psychological resources.

In fact, it is far more likely to find school-based peer-reviewed evaluations of wellbeing initiatives in journals such as Addiction than in education publications such as the Journal of Educational Psychology. The term wellbeing for example appears in only twenty articles in the latter, and half of them are from before 1950. The term mathematics, on the other hand, appears 795 times. Wellbeing was evidently not the focus of educational psychology in the second half of the twentieth century. Government funding, especially over the past decade, has encouraged a focus on what is collectively referred to as “STEM education,” consisting of science, technology, engineering, and math.

Without any doubt, society needs the scientists and engineers who will address the serious challenges of energy, climate change, and future technologies essential to our survival. And, of course, it's also critical that future generations gain the sophisticated understanding in these areas that will allow them to tackle twenty-first-century issues. But it seems that socioemotional skills?which are predictors of success in life?creative problem solving, and better decision making have been undervalued for far too long.

From the policy perspective, not only should adding wellbeing to the curriculum increase national wellbeing measures, it will also attend to other problems governments face, such as crime, poverty, drug abuse, and illness, all of which are frequently born from and exacerbated by ill-being. Intervening only once things are diagnosably bad requires expensive strategies such as long-term treatment and incarceration.

Despite the minimal attention given wellbeing in academic education research, new approaches geared at integrating socioemotional learning into the curriculum are emerging at the level of practice and within policy groups. For example, all children from kindergarten to sixth grade in New South Wales, Australia, follow a curriculum titled “Personal Development, Health, and Physical Education” that includes such modules as “Self and Relationships,” “Own Feelings and Empathy,” “Respect and Responsibility,” “Dealing with Conflict,” and “Diversity.” In the United States, the term social-emotional learning is used to describe similar curricula that aim to improve relationships and to develop emotional awareness and regulation, self-control, and healthy values. In the National Research Foundation report mentioned earlier, some of these programs were “shown to promote positive youth development while preventing mental health problems as well as substance abuse, violence, and other antisocial behaviour” (O'Connell, Boat, & Warner, 2009). Programs include:

• Inner Kids Program
• Inner Resilience Program
• Mindful Schools Program
• MindUP Program
• Still Quiet Place Program
• Stressed Teens Program
• Wellness Works in Schools Program

A RAND technical report titled Interventions to Improve Student Mental Health (Stein et al., 2012) provides an interesting review of the literature on such interventions written for policymakers in California. Prevention and early-intervention initiatives are grouped into those aiming to reduce stigma and discrimination, those on suicide prevention, and those on student mental health.

Others outside universities and governments have also recognized the importance of such research. The largest philanthropic organization in the world, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, recently funded a project led by neuroscientist Richard Davidson aimed at developing mindfulness in children.8 We discuss this project and other such schools projects in part II.

Of course, the difficulty in attending more seriously to this area of development in schools is compounded by a modern reliance on test scores as measures of student and teacher competence. Yet, remarkably, research shows that, in addition to making happier, safer, more resilient kids, these wellbeing programs also increase their academic performance. A recent meta-analysis (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011) of studies that included more than 200 schools (more than 270,000 students) showed that social and emotional learning programs lead to an impressive 11 percent gain in academic achievement.

This relationship is perhaps not surprising since positive emotions have been linked to better problem solving and enhanced creativity. Don Norman, among others, has highlighted the importance of designing for emotion (2005), much of which can be applied to the design of learning technologies. In Dorian's book Interface Design for Learning (2014), she looks at some of the emotions critical to learning and how design can support these emotions for better learning outcomes. For example, numerous studies have shown that positive emotions increase learning, creativity, problem-solving ability, and big-picture thinking. This work is related to Barbara Fredrickson's research on how positive emotions improve not only life experience, but also efficacy and resilience by increasing awareness, creativity, and exploratory behaviors (we look at the evolutionary importance of positive emotions in chapter 6).

As such, developing wellbeing in the learning environment also benefits from a better understanding of the dynamics of emotion involved in learning experiences as they occur. Educational psychology has tended to focus heavily on the cognitive aspects of learning rather than on the affective phenomena involved. Nevertheless, a number of researchers in the field have worked on certain areas of emotional experience, such as test anxiety, anger, frustration, and self-regulation (in both students and teachers) (Schutz & Pekrun, 2007). Among these emotions, test anxiety has received the most attention (particularly in the past few years in response to the increased reliance on standardized testing measures for evaluation in the United States).

The control-value theory of academic emotions (Pekrun, 2006) provides a way to analyze the antecedents and consequences of what students feel in learning situations. The theory assumes that appraisals of control (what is under a student's control and what is not) and values (how important the task is to a student) are essential to understanding the emotions felt in these activities (e.g., enjoyment, frustration, and boredom related to the learning activity as well as joy, hope, pride, anxiety, hopelessness, shame, and anger related to the outcome of the activity). There are clear overlaps with self-determination theory and its pillars of autonomy and competence. Education and wellbeing research undoubtedly have much to learn from each other, and we anticipate that they will begin to partner more consistently over the coming decade and will in all likelihood increasingly turn to technologists in their search for new tools to support investigation, learning, and wellbeing.