Session: Ensuring Program Relevance When Scaling up, Disseminating, and/or Sustaining School-Based Prevention Programming (Society for Prevention Research 26th Annual Meeting)

The goal of the current symposium is to present several preventative interventions that are at different stages of development in scaling and disseminating. The audience will have a unique opportunity to learn about study outcomes with a focus on the systematic processes used to expand programming on a wider-scale (disseminated and/or sustained) across diverse school settings. The symposium addresses the conference themes of Optimizing the Relevance of Prevention Science to Systems, and Dissemination and Implementation Science.

The first paper will focus on the Preventing Relational Aggression in Schools Everyday (PRAISE) Program. This classroom-based universal aggression prevention program has demonstrated strong effects, especially for girls including aggressive girls in past research (Leff et al., 2010). The presentation will focus on how the program was transitioned from being a research-led program to a school-staff run program and sustained with positive impact over the course of 3 years. Lessons learned and steps for sustaining programs as they are scaled and disseminated will be discussed in this context.

The second paper, presents results from a 40 school scale-up of the Free2B 3-D Bullying Prevention Experience across the state of Pennsylvania. Free2B is a novel 90-minute scientifically grounded assembly for 6th-8th graders that transforms school auditoriums into an interactive and technologically sophisticated cinema. While analyses conducted on the large sample of 14,000 youth will be presented, we will also focus on the processes, challenges, and steps required to scale this program to schools that vary in geographic location, context (urban, rural, and suburban), ethnic composition, and size.

The third talk will evaluate the impact of School-Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SW-PBIS) when scaled up to schools across an entire state. A quasi-experimental study examining both student behavioral and academic outcomes at the school level as well as student-level main and moderation effects will be presented. Findings demonstrated significant effects of SW-PBIS on suspensions and math and reading achievement in all schools and on truancy in middle and high schools. Of particular interest is whether these findings are replicated at the student level, and whether there are specific students who most benefit from SW-PBIS. Implications for implementation science, policies around positive behavioral approaches in schools, and educational practices will be discussed.

In sum, the paper presentations and discussion generated will focus upon illustrating the steps, challenges, and lessons learned from scaling up and disseminating a range of different school-based programs.