Experimental Evaluation of a Program to Foster Socioemotional Competence of Children in Third Grade and Their Teachers
NCT Number: NCT06515444
Status: NOT_YET_RECRUITING
Study Type: INTERVENTIONAL
Phases: NA
Conditions: Social Skills|Emotion Regulation
Interventions: BEHAVIORAL: 10 minutes program|BEHAVIORAL: 1 hour PD program
Sponsor: Universidad de los Andes, Chile
Collaborators: Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo
Sex: ALL
Age: CHILD, ADULT, OLDER_ADULT
Enrollment: 750
Study Design: Allocation: RANDOMIZED|Intervention Model: PARALLEL|Masking: SINGLE (PARTICIPANT)|Primary Purpose: TREATMENT
Start Date: 2024-07-22
Completion Date: 2026-12-20

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.

Primary Outcome Measures: Learning characteristics, leadership, motivation, communication, and planning skills., The Scales for Rating the Behavioral Characteristics of Superior Students developed by Renzulli et al. (2002) will be used. This scale has 14 subscales. Only 5 will be used: leadership, learning characteristics, motivation, communication, and planning skills. The other scales refer to learning behavior in specific disciplines (such as arts, music, science, etc.) and that is why they will not be used. The items of these scales will be responded by parents., Months 1, 5 and 12|Self-control, will be assessed using the Impulsivity Scale for Children (ISC). This is an 8-item survey responded by children that assesses the inability to regulate behavior, attention, and emotions in specific goals (Tsukayama, Duckworth \& Kim, 2013)., Months 1, 5 and 12|Grit, The 10-item likert scale that measures perseverance, the Oviedo Grit Scale (OGS; Postigo, Cuesta, García-Cueto et al., 2021) will be used. The scale has been adapted to Chile (reliability = 0.92; Postigo, Barria, Cuesta, Garcia-Cueto, 2023)., Months 1, 5 and 12|Mindset, Whether children view intelligence as a fixed trait rather than a trait that can be improved will be assessed using a 3-item scale developed by Dweck, Chiu and Hong (1995), widely used in Chile with an internal consistency of 0.86 (Claro, Paunesku \& Dweck, 2016)., Months 1, 5 and 12|Pro-social attitude, will be assessed using the 18-item Empathy Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (EmQue-CA) developed by Overgaauw, and colleagues (2017)., Months 1, 5 and 12|Behavioral difficulties, will be assessed using the 20-item parental or teacher survey Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) developed by Goodman (1997). The version for children was validated in Chile by Gaete et al. (2018) with internal consistency fluctuating between .76 and .85., Months 1, 5 and 12