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Intervention increased engagement, decreased disruption among students with behavioral disorder
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INSIGHTS, a social-emotional learning program, increased behavioral engagement and decreased disruptive and off-task behaviors among young children with high-maintenance temperaments in elementary school.
“Young children who exhibit disruptive behaviors and are disengaged in the classroom have fewer opportunities to learn. Consequently, they are at-risk to achieve lower levels of academic skills than their engaged, non-disruptive peers,” study researcher Meghan P. McCormick, PhD candidate, of the applied psychology department at New York University, and colleagues wrote. “Early intervention is needed to support children at risk for academic problems. Social-emotional learning (SEL) programs intervene on an interrelated set of children’s cognitive, affective, and behavioral skills known to be critical to academic performance.”
Meghan P. McCormick
Twenty-two elementary schools were chosen randomly to participate in the INSIGHTS program, an SEL intervention that integrates theory, research and clinical strategies in teacher, parent and classroom programs, or a supplemental reading program. Most children were enrolled in the study during kindergarten and were aged 5 years. Researchers evaluated child temperament, disruptive behaviors, behavioral engagement during academic activities, and teacher-child relationship quality. Data were collected from winter of the kindergarten year, 10 weeks before intervention, through spring of first grade.
Before intervention, there was a significant difference in reading achievement between children in the INSIGHTS group and children in the reading group. Statistical modeling addressed treatment differences, according to researchers.
Overall, children with high-maintenance temperaments in the INSIGHTS group had reduced levels of disruptive behavior (P=.04) and off-task behavior (P=.04) compared with their peers in the reading group.
Similarly, children with high-maintenance temperaments in the INSIGHTS group had higher overall levels of behavioral engagement compared with those in the reading group (P=.01).
Disruptive behaviors of children with high-maintenance temperaments who participated in the intervention progressed more slowly compared with their peers in the reading group (P=.04).
Off-task behaviors also grew slower among children with high-maintenance temperaments in the INSIGHTS group vs. those in the reading group (P=.04).
Behavioral engagement did not differ between treatment groups, according to researchers.
Moderation analyses indicated children with high-maintenance temperaments in INSIGHTS had higher quality teacher-child relationships vs. those in the reading group (P=.03), which may have contributed to reduction of disruptive and off-task behaviors.
“Improvement in the quality of the teacher-child relationship was a critical mechanism through which INSIGHTS affected disruptive behaviors and off-task behaviors of children with high-maintenance temperaments,” the investigators wrote. “This finding supports the theory that the intervention initially improves the goodness of fit between a child’s temperament and the academic learning context.”
Disclosure: Relevant financial disclosures were not available at the time of publication.
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