Table 1.

Overview of Daleiden & Chorpita’s (2005) four evidence bases applied to the promotion of educational outcomes in school-based mental health.

	Definition	Advantages	Limitations	When to prioritize?
General Services Research evidence	Information mined from the Existing Empirical literature.	Draws from generalizable, high-quality knowledge produced through systematic investigations.	Research linking mental health interventions to school or academic outcomes is very limited.	Early in treatment planning or when progress is suboptimal for an ongoing client (provided information relevant to the specific mental health and educational outcomes of interest is available).
Case history evidence	Case-specific data derived from clinical Interactions with clients.	Provides the most immediately relevant information about individual client progress in response to intervention. Highly consistent with RtI approaches in schools.	Must be developed over time for each individual. Not available for initial intervention planning (unless treatment is being reinitiated). Some educational outcome data may be difficult to obtain.	Should be prioritized for all cases following intervention initiation to guide decisions about maintaining or altering the selected intervention approach.
Local Aggregate evidence	Case history Evidence aggregated into larger units.	Generates local knowledge that is likely to be highly applicable to the service providers, recipients, and stakeholders in a given context. Can inform larger policy decisions, resource allocation (e.g., new trainings), or the establishment of client improvement benchmarks.	At the organization/agency level, requires significant infrastructure/resources to collect, integrate, manage, and interpret/use. At the clinician level, requires that a provider has been in practice and collecting data long enough to establish a caseload aggregate.	Across all phases of intervention (e.g., early in treatment planning to identify effective practices for a similar population; during intervention to determine if client progress is “on track;” toward the end of treatment to examine whether a client has met termination benchmarks).
Causal Mechanism evidence	General Understanding of etiological and treatment processes.	Draws from sources of knowledge/theory that may not have been codified in the empirical literature, including those specific to the educational/school context. Can inform interventions even when no data are available.	Least standardized of all the evidence bases, especially related to mental health and educational outcomes. There is little guidance about its systematic application, which may introduce unwanted bias.	Across all phases of the intervention process, but may be emphasized when case history evidence is lacking or to guide the search and application of the general services research evidence base.