Longitudinal Impacts of an Integrated Student Support Intervention on Elementary School Children’s Effort, Work Habits, and Prosocial Behavior

Introduction: Schools are a key context for child development and can therefore be an ideal site for prevention work with children and families. Schools are situated in communities and can leverage connections to out-of-school resources to promote thriving. At the same time, schools unfortunately can function to reproduce social class inequalities: children in poverty are significantly more likely to exhibit signs of disengagement at school (Alexander, Entwisle, & Horsey, 1997), to drop out of school, and to underperform academically as compared to their wealthier peers (Brooks-Gunn & Duncan, 1997). These inequities in school outcomes have lasting impacts on individual income, likelihood of unemployment, and likelihood of incarceration (Heckman, 2007). Thus, in addition to being well-situated for preventive intervention due to their resources and role in communities, schools are important sites for prevention work because the out-of-school risks that children face lead to achievement gaps which block economic mobility and inhibit thriving. This paper describes the effects of a theory-guided and evidence-based student support intervention on children’s social-emotional functioning. The intervention has previously been shown to impact academic skills; in this presentation, we focus on social-emotional skills, which are an important mediator between early life intervention and critical indicators of thriving in adulthood.

Methods: The intervention addresses in- and out-of-school factors that may seriously impede students’ ability to benefit from instruction. The intervention targeted all students in a sample of 18 schools in a large, high-poverty, urban district; students in all 73 schools in the same district that did not implement the intervention were selected for comparison. Outcomes included teacher-reported effort, academic work habits, and behavior.

Results: Growth models showed that while students in intervention and comparison schools entered school with similar levels of social-emotional skills, intervention students demonstrated steeper growth in their skills between 1^st to 5^th grade than did comparison students. Propensity weighted and standard error-adjusted models showed that the difference in skill levels was statistically significant (p < .05) at grade 5 for work habits and grades 3, 4, and 5 for effort. Despite a similar growth trend, differences in behavior did not reach statistical significance.

Discussion: Our results suggest that students in intervention schools experience higher levels of growth in their social-emotional skills than students in comparison schools. The final presentation will be updated with new data for students participating in recent years of the intervention and will estimate group-specific growth curves for Black, Latino, and very low-income students to determine whether the effects found for the total sample are replicated in these groups of children, who are disproportionately at risk for school failure.