Social-emotional learning and literacy development are important priorities for children’s services in many different countries. Research shows that programs designed to target one of these outcomes, usually has an indirect impact on the other. PATHS, for example, is a prevention program designed to enhance social emotional learning (SEL) that also has proven additional, though not directly targeted, effects on academic performance and attainment. Despite promising evidence of crossover effects, interventions are very rarely designed to target both SEL and academic outcomes simultaneously.
The 4Rs is one exception. Developed by a community-based, non-profit organization called the Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility (MCTSR), the 4Rs is designed to improve children’s social emotional, behavioral and academic outcomes through the alleviation of three key risk factors. These are i) a tendency to interpret ambiguous social cues as hostile; ii) a general acceptance amongst peers that aggression is an appropriate way to deal with problems; and iii) an inability to appropriately and effectively negotiate with peers.
Children who have these biases, beliefs and tendencies experience high levels of negative emotional arousal that leads to them experiencing difficulties both concentrating in class and recalling things they have learned. This in turn affects their academic performance. The negative school and class atmosphere created by large concentrations of children displaying these risk factors can also lead to elevated levels of fear, anxiety and sadness amongst hostile children and their peers.
The four Rs represent Reading, Writing, Respect and Resolution, and the curriculum has been designed to integrate within existing language arts lessons (in US elementary schools). The 4Rs requires that students have at least one class a week in which they engage in reading, writing, discussion, and skills practice aimed at fostering social emotional competence and conflict resolution skills. There are seven units or modules, each associated with a particular storybook described by the developers as high quality and age-appropriate.
The core activities in each unit are ‘read-aloud’, ‘book talk’ and ‘applied learning’. The book is first read to the class by the teacher and followed up with a discussion about the primary themes in the story. Themes include building a community, becoming a better listener, dealing well with conflict and celebrating diversity. Children are encouraged to connect those themes to their own lives and given opportunities to practise specific skills in the context of discussion about the book. The aim is for children to learn better ways of regulating feelings, relating to others, making decisions and dealing with conflict.
Teachers receive 25 hours of training as standard and an additional 12 sessions of coaching from the program developers. The initial training introduces the books, lessons and activities and gives teachers the opportunity to practise conflict resolution skills at adult levels through role-play. The idea is that teachers will go on to employ these techniques in their own personal and professional lives, in turn making it easier for them to teach the core principles of the program to their students.
The 4Rs is a universal school-wide prevention program and so the curriculum is designed to be delivered to all children during regular lesson time. The results of an experimental trial, reported recently in Child Development, indicate that the approach improves the behavior of all children but only benefits the academic performance of high-risk individuals.
Interim findings of the evaluation suggest that the program achieves positive effects on social-cognitive processing, behaviors and social emotional outcomes for all children. But academic outcomes, such as attendance, academic skills and standardized test scores, only improved for a sub-group of children identified by teachers at the start of the trial as at high-risk of poor academic performance and behavior.
The evaluation is led by Stephanie Jones at the Harvard School of Education and currently involves 18 ethnically diverse elementary schools in New York City. Data were initially collected on a total of 1,184 children in the third grade (age 8 years) who were followed up on a further three occasions over the course of two years.
Many interventions and evaluations focus on sub-groups of high-risk children. Large-scale evaluations of universal, school-wide implementations such as this are rare and those that have been conducted are challenged by several methodological limitations. Relatively few, for example, employ experimental designs or adopt a longitudinal perspective to determine longer-term outcomes. However this rigorous evaluation of the 4Rs program reveals favorable outcomes for those receiving it and with program costs estimated at a modest $150 per child per year, the future looks bright for reading, writing, respect and resolution.
Reference:
Jones SM, Aber JL and Brown JL (2011) Two-year impacts of a universal school-based social-emotional and literacy intervention: an experiment in translational developmental research, Child Development, 82, 2, p.533-554
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