The major purpose of the proposed project is to implement and evaluate a developmentally-based prevention and promotive intervention program for use with normally-adjusted and behaviorally at-risk second and third grade children. The specific preventive intervention program is a revised version of the PATHS/ (Providing Alternative Thinking Strategies) Curriculum for Children. Based on a theoretical development approach (Affective- Behavioral-Cognitive-Developmental or ABCD Model), which focuses on the importance of integrating emotional, cognitive, and linguistic functions for optimum maturation, it is hypothesized that PATHS will be shown to be an affective program for both (1) promoting personal competence and adaptive capacities in normally- adjusted children, and (2) preventing the development of serious behavioral disorders in children who are presently """"""""at risk."""""""" In order to assess the effectiveness of PATHS as both a promotive and prevention intervention program, the present project will utilize a pre-post-followup training design to separately compare intervention and control groups of a total of 300 normally-adjusted and 150 behaviorally at-risk children ages 8-9. Following training, the intervention children's regular classroom teachers will implement PATHS in 6 normal and 10 special classrooms. Matched control groups will receive regular classroom instruction from their untrained teachers in separate, but otherwise equivalent, classrooms. Posttesting and three followup assessments will be conducted over the next four years to evaluate long-term promotive and preventive effects. Pre, post, and followup testing will involve multiple-method, multiple measure assessment consisting of a battery of behavioral, affective-social cognitive, problem-solving, personality, and cognitive-academic measures. Data will be collected from the children, teachers, parents and school files. Based on the hypothesis that self-control, emotional understanding, social cognition, and interpersonal problem-solving skills are critical factors in both behavioral change and social-cognitive growth, a second major purpose of the present project will involve examining the reciprocal, causal relationships between affective, social-cognitive, behavioral, and cognitive-academic domains in normally-adjusted and behaviorally a-risk children. This second objective will involve two different types of statistical analyses: (1) Analyses of pretest prior to intervention, and (2) process analyses will be performed to investigate how improvements in self- control, emotional-social understanding, and problem-solving resulting from the intervention are related to changes in self- esteem and behavior.
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