Effectiveness of Early Risers Conduct Problems Prevention Program When Implemented by a Community Partner

Much evidence suggests that aggressive-disruptive behavior in the early school years is often the common beginning of antisocial trajectories leading to a range of diverse outcomes, including academic failure, peer rejection, alienation from school, substance use, and delinquency (Dobkin, et al., 1995; Hawkins, et al., 1992). To divert children off of this early starter pathway and onto a more positive developmental trajectory, the Early Risers conduct problems prevention program focuses on increasing academic, behavioral, and social skills in these children and on promoting positive parent-child interactions (August, et al., 2007). Early Risers is a comprehensive, evidence-based competence enhancement program that was implemented in the current study by a regional nonprofit in three small cities in the Midwestern U.S. The program used the PATHS curriculum (Greenberg & Kusche, 1998) to provide social-emotional skills training to early-elementary children with adjustment difficulties and an equal number of their well-adjusted peers. Children received 72 hours of structured activities over six weeks in each of two summers and continued this training one hour weekly throughout the intervening school year. Each child with difficulties was paired with a well-adjusted buddy to facilitate cooperative learning and play tasks within the context of ongoing social skills (PATHS), reading enrichment, and creative arts sessions. Summer program teachers incorporated buddy activities into every hour of instruction.

In the current study, the community agency employed the intervention practitioners and staff, contracting with the university research team for training and evaluation. Participants in seven schools included 130 children in kindergarten or first grade who met criteria for either aggressive disruptive or socially withdrawn behavior, as rated by their teachers on the BASC-2-TRS (Reynolds & Kamphaus, 2004). An additional 76 children from two other schools served as controls. Assessments using nationally normed instruments were conducted before the program, midway through, and after the program was completed. Results after the first two waves of data collection indicated that children in the program increased, relative to controls, in teacher ratings of social skills, leadership, adaptability, academic engagement, academic skills, and parent-teacher contact. Although most of the changes from pre to post are small (effect sizes around .2 SD), they occurred before the program was complete, and the fact that the changes are all in the same direction is a strong indication that the program had an initial positive effect across several domains of functioning. Results from the final data wave will also be presented.