Saturday, 15 January 2005 - 2:00 PM

This presentation is part of: School-Based Interventions

Outcomes from a Quasi-experimental Study of the Effectiveness of School-based Social Skills Training to Prevent Conduct Problems in Childhood

Purpose: The purpose of this presentation is to describe the results of a three-year study of a prevention program intended to reduce conduct problems in elementary school students. A skills-training program was developed and delivered to 3rd-grade students (51% male) in two southern schools comprised of African American (20%), Latino (41%), non-Latino White (34%), and other (5%) children. Findings describe three cohorts of children who received different types of programs. Entering 3rd grade in 2000, Cohort 1 (n=182) received a routine health curriculum. Entering 3rd grade in 2001, Cohort 2 (n=173) received the Making Choices (MC) program delivered by intervention specialists who visited schools once per week. Focused on skills for processing social information, regulating emotions, and solving social problems, MC requires approximately 28 hours of training. Entering 3rd grade in 2002, Cohort 3 (n=198) received the MC program plus an intervention designed to involve teachers and parents in MC-related activities. The teachers in Cohort 3 were given supplemental activities to reinforce and infuse MC training in routine classroom activities. In addition, parents were invited to a series of five "family nights," school-based evening programs designed to promote parent-school involvement, and they received a monthly newsletter that included home-based MC exercises.

Methods: An intent-to-treat (ITT) analysis was conducted in which all children were included in assessments regardless of their MC participation, which varied due to absences and conflicting class schedules. ITT is based on the idea that factors producing low participation in interventions may operate also when services are brought to scale. ITT analyses are thought to provide ecologically-valid estimates of treatment effects when an intervention is implemented in practice, where conditions differ from controlled clinical trials.

Teacher ratings of student behaviors were collected at the beginning and end of the three years over which the study was conducted. Focused on risk factors for conduct problems, measures include social contact, cognitive concentration, social competence, relational aggression, authority acceptance, and overt aggression. Two-level hierarchical linear modeling was used to estimate treatment effects at the classroom level (j=29). Level-1 regresses student posttest scores from each measure on covariates - pretest score, race/ethnicity, gender, and risk exposure. Level-2 regresses the student-level intercept and, where fit improved, slope estimators on classroom indicators for school and intervention.

Results: No significant differences across cohorts were observed at pretest. Controlling for covariates and testing for cross-level interactions, children in classrooms receiving the interventions had more prosocial posttest scores. However, findings varied by the type of intervention, i.e., MC alone versus the augmented MC. In contrast to the Cohort-1 comparison group, MC alone had significant effects on children's social contact and relational aggression. The augmented MC had significant effects on cognitive concentration, social competence, and relational aggression.

Implications for Practice: Findings suggest that, as implemented routinely in practice, MC is effective in disrupting peer-related risk processes associated with conduct problems. In addition, findings indicate that effects can be improved by training teachers to infuse MC content across classroom curricula and by involving parents through home-based applications and evening programs.

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