Exploring Student Support Team Functioning in Schools (2026-2027)

Aims

1. Explore current SST functioning by qualitatively coding team mechanisms during team meetings.
2. Assess SST members’ perspectives of team process and emergent states using quantitative survey data. 
3. Develop and pilot test a card sorting task to assess the shared mental models of team members. 

Purpose

For many children in California, and in the United States broadly, school is their only accessible point of mental healthcare. A research-based framework called multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) was developed to improve student mental and behavioral health outcomes by matching students with existing mental health services offered by their school. Student support teams (SST) are critical to the functioning of MTSS because a SST decides which children are connected to higher tiers of evidence-based intervention services. There is limited research on the tools and strategies that SSTs use to guide their decision making when developing each student’s intervention plan. Before making recommendations for improvement to the SST process, it is important to understand how SSTs work together to meet students’ needs. To answer this question, our research team will explore the ways that SSTs currently function within schools by 1) talking with school stakeholders, 2) observing SST meetings, and 3) collecting survey data that will ask each SST member about the team’s mission, shared goals, strategies used to meet those goals, and whether they believe the team can make meaningful change in the child’s educational program. Our research team will use the information we collect to create a task that will test each SST member’s understanding about the steps, people, and responsibilities involved in the SST process at their school. Findings from this study will help our research team identify the key ingredients of the SST process so that we can make appropriate recommendations to improve SST’s teamwork and decision making. [This will ensure SSTs have clear goals and a strong plan to meet each student’s unique needs effectively. To support feasible and sustainable change within schools, our research team will translate the study findings into a summary of actionable guidelines that will be provided to schools who participate in this study and to school leaders across San Diego County.]