Abstract
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) programs seek to enhance social and emotional competencies in children, including self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. By means of direct instruction regarding social and emotional competencies, SEL programs have the potential to strengthen resilience in children and thus their capacity to effectively cope with life’s challenges. Strengthening resilience in children who are repeatedly exposed to adverse experiences, particularly those from economically disadvantaged minority backgrounds, is of particular importance and has implications for the prevention of a multitude of problems later in life. Our study reports the result of an investigation of the SPARK Child Mentoring program, a resilience-focused SEL program designed to reduce risk factors, uncover innate resilience, promote natural emotional well-being, and facilitate school success. We employed a randomized controlled trial comprising 94 elementary school students that included pre- and post-intervention measurements. After controlling for pre-intervention levels, we found a significant difference between students’ understanding of underlying program principles; communication, decision making, and problem-solving skills; emotional regulation; and resilience for students who received the intervention compared to students who did not receive the intervention. These results provide initial evidence for the efficacy of the SPARK Child Mentoring program with a diverse sample of elementary school students and adds to the existing literature base concerning positive outcomes associated with SEL programs. We discuss implications for future research focused on long-term preventive effects of the program and the characteristics of students most likely to benefit from it.
Highlights
Decades of research highlight the important role of social and emotional competencies in child development
At pre-intervention, the intervention and comparison groups did not differ regarding their level of communication, decision-making, and problem-solving as measured by the CDP-Child Version, in their level of difficulties with emotional regulation as measured by the DERS-SF, nor in their level of resilience as measured by the Resiliency Scales for Children and Adolescents (RSCA)
The development of social and emotional competencies occurs over time as children progress through different developmental stages, navigating different developmental tasks and learning new skills
Summary
Decades of research highlight the important role of social and emotional competencies in child development. A strong evidence base demonstrates the important benefits of SEL programs, including positive impacts on socialemotional skills, mental health, academic functioning, overall health and well-being, and risk-taking behaviors (Corcoran et al, 2018; Dowling et al, 2019; Durlak et al, 2011; Taylor et al, 2017). The elementary school years represent an important stage of development for directly addressing social and emotional competencies. While resilience is often considered in the context of adaptation related to hardship, it is an important aspect of overall positive development (Masten, 2014). Parents provided their child’s date of birth, gender, race, and ethnicity on consent forms. Reliability analysis indicated a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.73 for the 3PI in our study sample (using both pre- and post-data)
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