Convener speech on School Psychology Symposium

In this speech, I want to focus on three things - importance of school psychology, relevance of school Psychology , and design of topic selection.

IMPORTANCE
There is growing evidence of increased psychological problems in children and adolescents especially behaviour problems and suicides. The prevalence rate of psychiatric disorders in India is 12.5% among children aged 0-16 years and 12% among the 4-16 year’s children (Srinata et al., 2005).  This suggests very high psychological stress on school going children. Psychological stress affects their scholastic and non-scholastic performance in school.
Worldwide increasing attention has been given on primary prevention of mental illness and risk reduction to vulnerability to mental illness in both school going children and the adolescents. Here in school psychology can play proactive role. Their presence can provide safety and security to the students, teachers, staffs, parents and the larger community. Presence of school psychologists prevents violence, decreases bullying, improves self-esteem, peer relations, student-teacher relations. Since, there is no separate comprehensive policy to deal with child mental health issues in India, school psychologists can play more critical role. 

RELEVANCE IN ISI

In coining this symposium , I thought of its relevance in ISI. 
         

Why school psychology in ISI ?  :  As school psychology principles are based on both academic and action researches, there is enough scope of statistics and mathematics in school psychology. Measurement of human abilities is most important. Professor P.C. Mahalanobis, the founder of this institute published research paper on human ability in 1933 in the International journal 'Sankhya' publication of ISI. Professor himself gave thrust on educational assessment. Therefore, he brought Prof. Edwin Harper from US. His student Late Prof. Purnendu kumar Bose gave emphasis on psychometrics. Another area is research methodology. Both experimental and survey methods are followed to evaluate effectiveness of intervention strategies. Psychometric principles are taken into account in psycho-educational test selection, in interpretation of test scores. 

DESIGN

This symposium has given emphasis on determinants, intervention strategies and policy making. Prof. Saurav Ghosh will focus on genetic determinants, Prof. Pritha Mukhopadhyay, Dr.Koel Das and Dr. Santoshi Halder will discuss remedial teaching and intervention strategies. Prof. Anjali Ray, Prof. R.N.Rai and Dr. D. Dutta Roy will focus on policy making.