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Teacher preparation programs should provide all teacher education students with appropriate training in recognizing and supporting mental health concerns so that they are able to recognize needs for mental health services referral. This is the argument that �������� Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology Nicole Lorenzetti presented to the American Education Research Association’s 2025 annual meeting.

Lorenzetti, who also directs the CCNY School of Education’s Program in Special Education, presented “It’s Just Who He Is: Mindsets of Teacher Education Students and Student Disciplinary Referral,” her preliminary findings for a full paper currently under review by the journal .

The upcoming paper was prompted by research that Lorenzetti conducted for her most recent  study, "," published in in last year. Her analysis of the relevant data yielded insights into teacher education students’ own beliefs about personality influence. Those beliefs determined how they decide between removing a disruptive student from the classroom for discipline or keeping the student in the classroom to work through the behavior, she found.

Participants in the original study were more likely to refer students displaying internalization symptoms (such as social withdrawal, self-blame, rumination, and anxiety) to the school psychologist. They were also more likely to address externalizing behavior (such as aggression, bullying, conduct problems, inattention, hyperactivity, and defiance) as opposed to internalizing behavior.

These conclusions were reached after analyzing answers to a series of questions posed to participants in a teacher preparation program. The questions regarded disciplinary decisions for each of eight vignettes based on four child pathology diagnostic categories.

“If teachers are at the forefront of recognizing disorders that underlie behavioral issues and they are responsible for recommending students to school administration for exclusionary discipline, it is vital that teachers receive training early to address biases they have around internalizing and externalizing disorders as well as to recognize when students should be referred for services as opposed to receiving exclusionary discipline,” wrote Lorenzetti. “This study contributes to this line of investigation by examining how teacher education students make classroom disciplinary decisions about common but disruptive classroom behavioral issues that are related to internalizing and externalizing behaviors.”