Surviving traumatic experiences requires a person to use resources that would have otherwise been targeted to learning new things, maintaining social relations, or engaging meaningful activities. Children fleeing from their home country, due to war and violence, have experienced multiple traumatic events and some of them suffer from mental health problems. This may affect their ability to learn. In this project, we develop, pilot and implement a new tool to be used in the school system for evaluating and supporting the mental health, cognitive functions and social competence of refugee children. The gains are twofold. First, we gain groundbreaking data of individual differences on cognitive functions, mental health and social competence among refugee children, and are able to compare it to that of other immigrant children and native Finnish children. Second, we can offer knowledge to support the learning and school belonging at the first stage of refugee children's school career.

2023

2027