The Effectiveness of Social and Character Development Programs in Elementary Schools

Background: Supported by federal legislation such as the No Child Left Behind Act, public education systems across the country have implemented a variety of character education, violence prevention, civic responsibility, social competence, and moral development programs. In spite of wide spread adoption, these programs have rarely been rigorously evaluated. To conduct a rigorous test of these programs, the US Department of Education and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funded a multi-program, multi-site test of Social and Character Development (SACD). Across six independent but cooperatively funded sites, well-known SACD programs were implemented and evaluated in a 3-year cluster randomized trial involving 84 elementary schools. Each site conducted its own evaluation and Mathematica Policy Research was hired to conduct the cross-site evaluation.

The proposed paper will describe the overall evaluation, the process of working on a cooperative agreement with far-reaching public policy implications, and the results from one of the six sites. At this site, the Making Choices (MC) program was implemented and evaluated. Based on social information processing theory, MC is a fully manualized social problem-solving skills training curriculum. It was provided by classroom teachers who received in-service training and ongoing consultation in providing the program and in managing classroom social dynamics. Administered school-wide, MC was designed to disrupt continuities between early aggressive behavior and poor child developmental outcomes, such as school dropout and delinquency.

Methods: Findings from the MC site use data collected from 841 children who were recruited from 10 rural schools randomized equally to intervention and control conditions. The sample is 61.1% European American, 24.7% African American, 8.4% Hispanic, and 4.8% other race/ethnicities. Students and their parents were consented in spring 2004 while in second grade, and they participated in the study until the spring of the fifth grade in 2007. Data were collected from students and teachers in the fall and spring of each school year and included both behavioral and academic child assessments. Multiple analytic methods are used to account for clustering and selection.

Results: Children in intervention and control schools differed significantly at pretest on race/ethnicity, household structure, parent age at child birth, and income. To control for selection bias, propensity scores were estimated and used in two different analyses: optimal full matching with the Hodges-Lehman aligned rank test and weighted hierarchical linear models. From both methods of analysis, the grade 4-grade 5 results suggest that the intervention program improved children's cognitive concentration and prosocial behavior, while reducing relational aggression. The effect sizes for outcomes were small (d=.20 to .30) but comparable to effects observed for language arts and other content in elementary school.

Conclusions: Findings suggest that MC, when provided by teachers who are skilled in managing classroom dynamics, produces significant effects on the classroom behavior of elementary school children. In the context of a large national evaluation of SACD programs, the findings from one site indicate that social problem-solving skills training holds promise to disrupt negative developmental trajectories leading to school dropout and other negative life course outcomes.