Experimental Evaluation of a Program to Foster Socioemotional Competence of Children in Third Grade and Their Teachers

Summary

The 10-minutes project is an experimental study to assess the impact of a SEL program for children in 3th and 4th grade and their teachers called 10-minutes.

The program is a curriculum that provides 10-minute activities (thus the name) for children to be implemented by the teachers daily throughout the school year. The activities do not require prior knowledge of teachers on SEL development, nor planning or material preparation.

The 10-minute project is a quantitative study developed to evaluate whether the 10-minute curriculum and an expanded version with professional development activities for teachers or counselors, 10-minute plus, at third grade would improve students and teachers' socioemotional competence. The randomized control trail involves 30 schools in Chile, matched on socioeconomic measures, size, and urban/rural conditions, assigned randomly to 1 of 3 conditions. Ten schools will receive 10-minutes only, the SEL curriculum taught by teachers or school counselors, during the 2024 and 2025 school years. Ten schools will receive 10-minutes plus during the 2024 school year. Ten schools will serve as "delayed program" control, which will have the opportunity to receive the program (10-minutes plus) after the final follow-up. To examine the possibility of fade-out of the effects of the SEL intervention on students, the first experimental condition (10-minutes only) will be randomly divided into two groups, one will receive the intervention for one year only, whereas the second one will receive the intervention for two consecutive years.

It is expected the program will yield positive effects on the experimental groups (both students and teachers), and effects are expected to be greater in the group offered the 10-minutes plus intervention which entails both a curriculum for children and professional development for teachers, than the effects in the group offered the 10-minutes curriculum exclusively. If the program proves to be effective, then cost-benefit analyses will follow to assess the efficiency of the program. The estimated benefits of the program are expected to be lower than the costs.

Conditions

• Social Skills
• Emotion Regulation

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

10 minutes program

The curriculum component offers 10-minute daily doses of activities targeting the development of eight socioemotional competences in children: (i) emotional knowledge and management, (ii) developing a healthy identity, (iii) establishing and maintaining positive relationships, (iv) feeling and showing empathy, (v) establishing and reaching goals, (vi) responsible decision-making, (vii) contributing to the community and (viii) developing spirituality. The activities do not require the teacher to plan or to prepare material for the students.

BEHAVIORAL

1 hour PD program

The professional development (PD) component is a 1-hour dose of activities targeting each of the eight SECs on which the curriculum focuses. The focus of PD is not to teach about SEC development in children but to develop SEC in teachers. Thus, this is an 8-hour PD program distributed throughout the academic year.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo

  collaborator OTHER

• Universidad de los Andes, Chile

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Barbara Hanisch-Cerda, PhD · Universidad de los Andes, Chile

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2024-07-22

Primary Completion

2026-12-20

Completion

2026-12-20