Evaluation of Emotion Coaching
Creators: name: Stoilova, Ekaterina
name: Ng-Knight, Terry
name: Speight, Svetlana
name: Sehaj Bhatti
name: Upadhyay, Nandita
name: Papaioannou, Kostas
Publisher: name: OSF Registries
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Educational Psychology
subject: Education
subject: Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research
subject: Early Childhood Education
subject: child self-regulation skills
subject: early years
subject: early years programme
subject: early years self-regulation
subject: emotional co-regulation
subject: impact evaluation
subject: implementation and process evaluation

description: The programme


Emotion Coaching (EC) is a training programme for early years practitioners developed by Emotion Coaching UK (ECUK), aimed at helping children develop self-regulation.

EC is a relational approach which fosters warm and responsive relationships and co-regulation between child and practitioner, and supports children to understand the different emotions they experience, why they occur and how to handle them.

The EC training follows a four-step framework: 
• Step 1 – Recognising the child’s feelings and empathising with them. 
• Step 2 – Validating the feelings and labelling them. 
• Step 3 – Setting expectations of behaviour (if needed). 
• Step 4 – Problem solving with the child.

Training adults in the four-step framework of EC intends to facilitate adults in becoming more aware of, paying attention to and empathising with the emotions that children are experiencing. It is expected that through EC, adults will be able to label and validate children’s feelings and help them feel calmer. Over time, through co-regulation, the programme aims to help children develop self-regulation.


The evaluation


The evaluation of EC is funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), with ECUK delivering the programme and the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) carrying out the research.

ECUK will recruit 160 settings to take part in the evaluation. In settings that are randomised to EC, practitioners will take part in the ECUK training. Trained practitioners will then be able to use the EC approach with the 3-4-year-old children at their settings. In settings randomised to the control group, staff will carry on with their usual practice.

The trial will take place in PVI and school-based nursery settings in England. As a part of the Department for Education’s Early Years Recovery Programme, eight Stronger Practice Hubs (SPHs) across many local authorities in North East, Yorkshire and the Humber, East Midlands, East of England, South East and South West will support ECUK with the recruitment of settings.

The programme will be delivered in the 2024-2025 school year, from November 2024 to May 2025. There will be two evaluation reports: the main evaluation report using data collected during the trial will be published in spring 2026, and a follow-up report using data matched from the National Pupil Database will be published in summer 2027.


Impact Evaluation


The impact evaluation (IE) of the EC training programme will aim to answer the following primary research question:

RQ1: Does the EC programme improve children’s self-regulation, as reported by practitioners?

The IE will be conducted as a two-arm cluster randomised controlled efficacy trial, with settings as the unit of randomisation and children as the unit of analysis.

A total of 160 settings will be recruited and randomised into two trial arms: the Emotion Coaching programme and practice as usual (PAU) control. We will randomise at the setting level, as the programme delivery targets practitioners, and all children within a setting are expected to be exposed to EC-trained practitioners. Randomisation of settings will be stratified by region and setting type (i.e., PVI and school-based/maintained nurseries), to ensure balance of these characteristics between EC and control settings.

Financial incentives will be provided to settings allocated to control for participating in data collection activities. Additional incentives will be provided to practitioners and parents/carers in all settings for participating in endline data collection.

The primary outcome investigated is child self-regulation (practitioner report), as measured with the Child Self-Regulation &amp; Behaviour Questionnaire (CSBQ), combined average score of the cognitive, behavioural, and emotional self-regulation subscales (Howard and Melhuish, 2017). In a subgroup of settings, an observation-based measure of child self-regulation will be collected by independent assessors, in order to explore potential bias in practitioners’ reports on the CSBQ.

Secondary child-level outcomes that will be investigated include parent/carer report of child self-regulation, child prosocial behaviour (practitioner and parent/carer report), and child early learning goals attainment in self-regulation and building relationships in reception year. We will also investigate practitioner meta-emotion philosophy (MEP) as a secondary teacher-level outcome.


Implementation and Process Evaluation


The Implementation and process evaluation (IPE) of the EC programme will take a mixed-method approach to data collection and include observations, in-depth interviews, surveys, and collection of monitoring and cost data, capturing experiences and views of multiple practitioners involved in the trial.

It will aim to answer the following research questions:
RQ8: How is the programme different to usual practice?
RQ9: To what extent is the programme delivered as intended?
RQ10: What are the facilitators and barriers to the delivery of the programme?
RQ11: What are the perceived outcomes of the programme for practitioners?
RQ11a: Are there any differences in outcomes for those practitioners who are trained through the cascading model of the programme?
RQ12: What are the perceived outcomes of the programme for children, including for their self-regulation?
RQ12a: Are there any differences in outcomes for children from disadvantaged backgrounds?
RQ13: What are the perceived outcomes of the programme at the setting level?
RQ13a: Are there any differences in outcomes between school based and PVI settings?
RQ14: What is the per-child cost of the programme?

A key element of the IPE will be interviews with practitioners in the intervention group settings, including members of the leadership team at the setting who received EC training, other EC trained practitioners to help interpret and contextualise our IE findings. These practitioners will include members of the leadership team at the setting (e.g. PVI setting managers or heads of Early Years Foundation Stage in schools) who received EC training, other practitioners trained by the ECUK team, and practitioners trained through cascading. Another key element of the IPE will be surveys with practitioners working with 3-4-year old children in both intervention and control group settings. These surveys will be conducted at baseline and at endline.

Following EEF guidance, we will collect data on cost to settings and cost to the delivery team, and estimate setting costs for implementing the programme per-pupil-school-year over a period of 3 years.


Ethics


NatCen’s Research Ethics Committee (REC) reviewed and approved NatCen’s research proposal for this project in December 2023. NatCen’s ethics procedure is aligned with the 2021 Government Social Research (GSR) professional guidance and the 2021 Social Research Association (SRA) ethics guidance.