Brooke Paskewich, PsyD, research focuses on promoting positive social-emotional health and development of children through the provision of evidenced-based supports and interventions. She has centered this work in the prevention and intervention of aggressive and bullying behaviors in school settings through a range of indicated and universal research programs designed for students, school counselors and teachers. Her team  also provides evidence-based resources, workshops, training/coaching, professional development, and consultations for caregivers, school faculty and staff, and interdisciplinary researchers, healthcare providers, and trainees to equip them with knowledge and skills to support children’s positive development and relationships.

Dr. Paskewich has twenty years of experience conducting federally-funded intervention development research through community-based participatory research (CBPR) and qualitative methods. With her team, these programs include Friend to Friend/F2F (Tier II, small-group aggression prevention program for high-risk 3rd-5th grade students), PReventing Aggression in Schools Everyday/PRAISE Friendship Voyagers (Tier I, universal classroom-based aggression and bullying prevention program for 3rd-5th grade students), and PRAISE Friendship Explorers (Tier I, universal classroom-based social-emotional skill promotion and aggression prevention program for 1st-2nd grade students). These programs are grounded in psychological theory and empirically supported intervention strategies and infused with feedback from diverse youth and adult stakeholders in community schools.  

Relatedly, she has expertise directing implementation studies of these interventions. With foundation funding (e.g., Pew Charitable Trusts, Kohl’s Cares Hospital Foundation), Dr. Paskewich directed multiple dissemination and evaluation projects for Friend to Friend and PRAISE across Philadelphia schools. Additionally, with NIH and IES funding, she directed the implementation of two school-based efficacy (i.e., researcher-led) trials of Friend to Friend and PRAISE, and more recently, directed the implementation of three effectiveness (i.e., school-led) trials of Friend to Friend (40-school NIH RCT), PRAISE (8-school CDC RCT), and the Bullying Classroom Check-Up that integrates virtual reality simulation and guided coaching to train teachers to detect, prevent and intervene with bullying in the classroom (32-school NIH RCT). She also co-directed pilot studies of PRAISE Friendship Voyagers and is the Program Evaluator for an Independence Blue Cross Foundation-funded school-based mental health (SBMH) program. All of these studies utilize multi-informant, multi-method data collection procedures to monitor implementation and assess outcomes longitudinally over time.

Dr. Paskewich also studies ways to bridge the gap between school-based research and practice in authentic educational settings. She has leveraged the aforementioned studies to develop responsive methods to establish school partnerships, recruit and retain participants, and balance implementation fidelity with flexibility to maximize intervention feasibility, generalizability, and sustainability. She is interested in factors (e.g., treatment fidelity and school, implementer, and program characteristics) that are associated with intervention outcomes and that facilitate or impede program uptake and fidelity, and how schools can independently implement and sustain evidence-based programs. Toward the latter goal, her recent work has centered on scaling Friend to Friend through non-trial program implementation and dissemination in real world school conditions, which is currently funded through private philanthropy and grants from the PA Department of Health, Cigna Foundation, and Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD).