By Wenrui Huang, Johns Hopkins University
Harvard University’s Stephanie Jones and colleagues examined 2-year experimental impacts of a school-based intervention in social-emotional learning and literacy development, called the 4Rs, on children’s social-emotional, behavioral, and academic functioning.
The 4Rs program, an intervention unique in its integration of literacy practices and social-emotional skill-building, has two components: literacy-based curriculum delivery in social-emotional learning and teacher training. Subjects were from 18 public New York City inner-city elementary schools (n= 9 E schools/9 C schools; E=630 students, C=554 students). The treatment group received both components of the intervention from 3rd to 5th grade. Results suggested that children in the intervention schools showed improvements in several non-cognitive domains: self-reports of hostile attributional bias, aggressive interpersonal negotiation strategies, depression, teacher reports of attention skills, and aggressive and socially competent behavior. While there were no main effects of the intervention on teacher reports of children’s academic skills, those who were at the highest behavioral risk at baseline demonstrated improvement in math (+0.56) and reading (+0.60) achievement, as measured by children’s scaled scores on New York State standardized assessments.
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