Consistent with the Research Center on Child Well-Being?s overarching theme, the project addresses prevention of mental-emotional-behavior problems including promotion of self-regulation, and begins to integrate health-related variables into the conceptual and measurement plan. This project builds on research from a first-grade classroom strategy, the PAX Good Behavior Game, that has already shown some promise in reducing or preventing social maladjustment and aggressive-disruptive behavior. The intervention focuses on promotion of classroom-wide prosocial interactions and cooperation by all children throughout the school day?s tasks and activities. The two major project goals are: (1) a controlled examination of whether the first-grade intervention improves child self-regulation while replicating preventive impact on aggressive-disruptive behavior; and (2) exploration of whether other health-related functioning might moderate intervention outcomes. Although the importance of self-regulation for behavioral development and health is clear, the extent to which the intervention positively impacts self-regulation has not been fully established. The main study design for the first goal involves randomization of schools to either first-grade classroom intervention or control (programming as usual). The second goal will be pursued with a subsample of children to explore whether better/worse sleep duration might moderate intervention effects on outcomes, and similarly whether higher/lower screen time, an index of sedentary behavior in young children, might moderate intervention effects on self-regulation and the other outcomes. As an additional project objective, teacher self-efficacy and potential burnout will be explored as a factor that might be related to quality of implementation for the classroom intervention. This project is intended to guide the development of a larger and more comprehensive prevention trial. The research team will consider: (a) whether and how the health-related variables should be embeded in the research design (including the possibility of adding an arm that targets healthy lifestyle behaviors as outcome variables); (b) how self-regulation can be bolstered further; and, (c) how to carefully attend to implementation science issues given what is learned about teacher-implementers.
