Cross-Disciplinary Discourse to Bridge the Socioemotional and Academic Strands of Development INTRODUCTION

This topical issue is a culmination of two gatherings funded by the National Science Foundation that focused on cross-disciplinary discourse to examine the overlaps between children's academic achievement and socioemotional competence. The first was a symposium, "Theory and Practice of Successful Schooling: Nexus Between Academic Achievement and Social Emotional Competence," which brought together scholars from multiple disciplines; the second was a meeting of the authors who contributed to this issue. Following the symposium, the planning committee, reflecting on the ideas and processes that had come to light and considering feedback from attendees on the initial draft, proposed a framework for cross-disciplinary exchanges that was subsequently used to structure the authors' meeting (see the Appendix). By casting variables as properties of persons, environments, dynamics of person-environment interactions, and their combination, this framework provides a common language with which to examine each author's central insights about how these variables relate to one another and to important academic and socioemotional domains of functioning/outcomes. © 2010 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.