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Al’s Pals: Kids Making Healthy Choices is an early childhood curriculum designed to increase the protective factor of social and emotional competence in young children and to decrease the risk factor of early and persistent aggression or antisocial behavior. The program was piloted in Head Start and other community-based child development centers whose populations included primarily African-American and white children. Since the pilot, the program has been expanded and found to be effective with children ages 3 to 8 of all socioeconomic and racial backgrounds living in urban, suburban, and rural areas. Al’s Pals has been proven to work in preschools, early elementary school grades, afterschool programs, and childcare centers.
The program follows from the premise that by intervening during the early years when children are forming patterns of behaviors and attitudes, reductions can be made in the likelihood of their later developing aggressive, antisocial, or violent behavior. Al’s Pals is based heavily on resiliency research as a framework for developing an intervention. Its curriculum is designed to build resiliency by presenting children with real-life situations that introduce them to health-promoting concepts and prosocial skills. The program also recognizes the ongoing nature of resilience-building and trains teachers to use resilience-promoting concepts in their teaching and classroom management practices.
Al’s Pals uses 46 interactive lessons to teach children how to practice positive ways to express feelings, relate to others, communicate, brainstorm ideas, solve problems, and differentiate between safe and unsafe substances and situations. The lessons are delivered twice a week over 23 weeks. It is ideal to deliver the program during circle time or in an open reading area. Each lesson lasts 15 to 20 minutes and typically consists of two or three activities. Fourteen of the lessons have letters and activities for parents. Optional follow-up activities can be incorporated later in the school day. A nine-lesson booster curriculum is used in second or third grade with children who have previously received the full program. Required training sessions for teachers address the underlying conceptual framework of the program and implementation issues.
Several studies of Al’s Pals conducted in preschools, elementary schools, and childcare centers since the program was first piloted in 1993 show promising results. For example, a pilot evaluation study conducted in Virginia during the 1994–95 school year used a quasi-experimental design to assess program impacts on child social-emotional competence. This study was conducted with 10 intervention group classrooms (n=173) and 4 comparison group classrooms (n=48) in a variety of settings (rural, urban, suburban). Participating classrooms were chosen because they had children with similar characteristics, teachers with similar skill levels, and no other prevention or teacher training programs active in the school that year. Classrooms were randomly assigned a condition to the extent possible. There were no significant differences in demographic characteristics between intervention and control group children and teachers. Children were assessed by teachers before and after program participation using the project-developed Child Behavior Rating Scale (CBRS), a measure of social-emotional competencies in behavior, including appropriate expression of feelings, demonstration of self-control, and use of prosocial methods of problem-solving.
Another pilot study conducted in Virginia during the 1995–96 school year used a quasi-experimental design to assess program impacts on child social-emotional competence and coping skills. This study was conducted with 16 intervention group classrooms (n=230) and 7 comparison group classrooms (n=103). Classrooms were randomly assigned to intervention and control groups. There were no significant differences in demographic characteristics between intervention and control group children and teachers. Children were assessed by teachers before and after program participation using the CBRS and the Teacher Report of Child Coping, an instrument used to measure coping styles.
In another study, an experimental design was used to evaluate Al’s Pals in a large Michigan Head Start program during the 1996–97 school year. Seventeen classrooms (n=218) were randomly assigned to receive the intervention, and 16 classrooms (n=181) served as controls. The classroom sites were selected based on comparability and randomly assigned to intervention and control conditions. There were no significant differences in demographic characteristics between intervention and control group children and teachers. For both intervention and control groups, the mean age of children entering the study was around 52 months, and gender was roughly evenly divided. About half of each group was white, one fourth African-American, and one fourth Hispanic, biracial, or another ethnic group. Teachers assessed the children in the fall and spring of that school year, about 7 months apart. Measures used include the CBRS, the Teacher Report of Child Coping, and the Preschool and Kindergarten Behavior Scale, the last of which includes measures of social skills and problem behaviors.
For the 1994–95 study, results of repeated measures analysis of variance (known as ANOVA) showed that intervention children had significantly greater improvements in behavior than control group children. A similar analysis used in the 1995–96 study showed that intervention children had significantly greater improvements in behavior than control group children, as well as higher postscores for positive coping and lower postscores for negative coping.
Data from the 1996–97 Michigan study was analyzed using independent t–tests, paired t–tests, and repeated measures of variance to assess differences between intervention and control groups, to examine within-group pre–post changes, and to compare the degree of change experienced by both groups. The results of the analysis showed statistically significant improvements in prosocial skills in the intervention group. There was no significant improvement in prosocial skills for control group participants. In terms of problem behavior, there was no change for the intervention group, while problem behavior for the control group increased. As in previous studies, this analysis revealed a higher degree of positive change for the intervention group than for the control group. Findings from additional one-group pre–post replication studies conducted in Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, and Virginia from 1997 to 2000 had similar results, including higher degrees of positive change in the intervention groups, increases in prosocial behaviors and positive coping behaviors, and decreases in antisocial and negative coping behaviors.
K.B. Lynch, Susan R. Geller, and M.G. Schmidt. 2004. “Multiyear Evaluation of the Effectiveness of a Resilience-Based Prevention Program for Young Children.” Journal of Primary Prevention 24(3):335–53.
Susan R. Geller
Wingspan LLC
4196–A Innslake Drive
Glen Allen, VA 23060
Phone: (804) 967-9002
Fax: (804) 967-9003
E-mail: contact@wingspanworks.com
Web site: http://www.wingspanworks.com
