School-based prevention: One size does not fit all

Researchers explore what works and what doesn?t.

By Patrick A. McGuire
Monitor staff

If you?re a researcher running a carefully designed study project based on solid theories, there?s nothing like proving your case at the end. Some would even argue that clearly disproving a hypothesis could be equally valuable.

What happens, though, when you prove your point, sort of?

That?s what Eric Schaps, PhD, is trying to puzzle through after his four-year project, aimed at promoting social and emotional competence in children, seemed to work fine in five elementary schools around the country. But in seven other schools it not only didn?t improve conditions, it made things worse.

His frustration is similar to that faced by Nancy Guerra, EdD. Her eight-year study on preventing aggression and violence in high risk Chicago children , showed a significant impact?but only on certain children, in certain kinds of schools, in certain neighborhoods. Among other children, her interventions added stress and disruption to school functioning, she said.

Both Schaps and Guerra were part of a symposium on school-based prevention programs sponsored by the APA Board of Directors at APA?s 1998 Annual Convention in San Francisco.

Schaps has spent 18 years researching the field of social and emotional competence in children. He went into his most recent project, he said, hoping to rectify specific negative aspects of schools?identified during his prior research?which unfavorably effect children.

No sense of community

'Schools are not caring places,' he said. 'Children don?t experience in school what we call a sense of community, which is the experience of being a valued, contributing member of a classroom or school, where everyone is dedicated to the welfare and learning of every member of the group.'

His team administered a program in a dozen schools?along with 12 comparison schools?across the country in which teachers received intensive staff development training in school-wide interventions aimed at building a sense of community and altering the way teachers motivate their students.

In addition to schools being uncaring, Schaps said, he believed most teachers in most classrooms used a passive learning process, best exemplified by the tired metaphor of 'filling empty vessels.' He found, also, that teachers relied too heavily on extrinsic motivational strategies?-points, stickers, grades, and the use of competition?to motivate learning. 'Only to a lesser extent do they focus on the intrinsic interest or purpose of learning,' he said.

Finally, he argued, even though most schools emphasize rules and procedures, 'the ethical and social lessons that we want children to learn are not explicitly taught.'

While his program included getting parents involved in the social life of the school, it also stressed specific classroom changes. Teachers adopted a cooperative learning style that allowed children to interact in both informal and structured ways, and they did not use rewards or punishments to motivate learning.

There was also a reading program aimed at sensitizing children to cultural groups different from their own.

The goal of his project, he said, was to accomplish four things: 'help schools help kids build warm, stable, support relationships; help schools attend systematically to ethical, social and emotional learning; help schools honor and build in children intrinsic motivation; and to treat children as having active minds.'

In the end, five schools, he said, showed 'widespread positive effects on children?a stronger sense of school as community, greater intrinsic academic motivation and greater task orientation.' But in the seven schools where change did not take place, he said, 'those students looked on a number of these same measures worse in comparison. For us, this is a very big issue. We invested intensively in trying to change those schools.'

High-risk children

Guerra, now a faculty member at the University of California, Riverside, conducted her prevention study on high-risk children from grades two through five in lower middle-class and poor Chicago neighborhoods.

Designed to prevent aggression and violence, the study had students take part in a program that offered three additive levels of intervention, with each succeeding level involving students?depending on the assessment of their risk?in more intense activities.

The lowest risk children?among an overall high-risk population?were in a two-year classroom enhancement segment that included a seminar series for teachers that focused on developing prosocial behaviors in children and creating environments that encouraged such behavior. It also included a two-year social cognitive curriculum for children that emphasized social problem-solving activities.

The next level was a peer program aimed at higher risk children that met in small groups once a week for two years. The third and most involved level focused on family intervention, with emphasis on communication, listening, management and support building. The program found that while the intervention did have a significant impact on children, it was limited to the youngest students from the more moderate-income neighborhoods who were involved in the level-three family-intervention segment.

'It?s not something that works across the board,' said Guerra. 'We found that low resource schools are very stressed out. Often we introduced interventions that actually contributed more to the stress and disrupted the functioning even more.'

Yet mixed results weren?t what Mark Greenberg, PhD, came away with after a three-year prevention study of about 25 elementary schools in four Seattle, Wash.; Durham, N.C.; Nashville, Tenn., and three towns in rural Pennsylvania.

In fact, said Greenberg, the director of the Prevention

Research Center at Pennsylvania State University, his data showed 'significant affects' in lowering tendencies for aggressive behavior and increasing those for prosocial behavior among the 7,000 children?mostly first graders-?who participated. He reported no negative results in any of the sites.

His study was based on the Fast Track model, a cooperative effort of the Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group (CPPRG) funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and other federal agencies. CPPRG involves researchers at Duke and Vanderbilt Universities, the University of Washington, and Pennsylvania State University.

Greenberg?s study reported on the effects of the PATHS curriculum (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies) that he and Carol Kusche, PhD, of Seattle, have developed over the last 17 years. PATHS was the universal or primary prevention component of a larger study on the prevention of antisocial behavior.

Taught by classroom teachers who had been trained in PATHS, it sought to build self-control and social competence in young children. For instance, said Greenberg, one goal was to have children 'become aware of and talk about their emotions.'

A tool used to accomplish that was a box given to children, containing a variety of simply drawn faces, each on its own card. 'We teach them about 32 different feelings,' Greenberg explained. 'The children are taught that when they are upset or happy or whatever the feeling is, they can post it on their desk.'

When two children come in from the playground after a fight, he said, a teacher can diffuse the situation by saying something like 'You both look very upset, and I?m starting to get upset too. Let?s both find our Feeling Faces and see how we?re feeling.'

The faces tool, says Greenberg, supports the concept of 'using verbal self-control and understanding affect as a way of regulating behavior.'