Lab member Lucero Ramírez-Varela, doctoral candidate in Applied Psychology at NYU Steinhardt, along with J. Lawrence Aber and lab director Jorge Cuartas, have published a new working paper in the NYU Steinhardt Education Policy Working Paper Series: “Understanding School Unpredictability and Its Connection to Children’s Social and Emotional Development: A Conceptual Framework.”

This paper introduces a multi-level framework explaining how unpredictability in school environments, particularly in crisis-affected and under-resourced contexts, can undermine children’s social and emotional development (SEL). While much research has focused on trauma and material deprivation, this framework positions unpredictability as a distinct and underexplored dimension of developmental risk.

Drawing from developmental psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, ecological theory, and dynamic systems theory, the paper argues that repeated disruptions in school routines, relationships, and expectations erode the social regularities children rely on to regulate emotions, sustain attention, and engage in learning.

By conceptualizing unpredictability as a modifiable feature of school environments, this framework opens new directions for research, intervention, and policy aimed at strengthening children’s social and emotional development.

Read the full paper here.

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