Low-income students who received a preschool intervention focused on social-emotional development continued to benefit from it during their teen years according to a recent study published in the journal Child Development.
The researchers, led by Karen Bierman, Evan Pugh University Professor of Psychology and Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State, found that their Head Start Research-based, Developmentally Informed (REDI) intervention improved students’ behavior and mental health during high school.
Funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the longitudinal study began in 2002 to build on the mission of the Head Start program, which was initiated by the federal government in the 1960s to serve the developmental and educational needs of low-income children and their families.
“We wanted to work with Head Start and look at whether there were ways to strengthen the programming by incorporating more up-to-date research on what we knew about social-emotional development, how growing up in poverty affects that, and how to compensate for early disparities and build on strengths for school,” Bierman said. “We also focused on early language development and emergent literacy skills, which provide the foundation for later reading, and also support social-emotional and self-regulation skills, like impulse control and attention focus.”
The study started with 356 children from 26 Head Start centers in three Pennsylvania counties, with half of them receiving the intervention and the others continuing with their usual practices. The intervention included a social-emotional learning curriculum focused on developing friendship skills and emotional knowledge such as being able to tell the difference between sadness and anger, along with an interactive reading program that supported language development and reinforced learning with social-emotional stories.
Understanding the context of different feelings and becoming more aware of their own feelings helps children develop better self-control and focus, which supports growth in problem-solving skills and overall academic readiness, said Bierman, former director of the College of the Liberal Arts’ Child Study Center and current director of its School Readiness Initiative.
When the intervention yielded positive effects, Bierman and her collaborators were able to secure additional funding from the NICHD to keep the study going into the students’ elementary school years and beyond.
“How do these things learned as a preschooler pay off in future years? That was the question we were asking in these longitudinal follow-ups,” Bierman said. “We saw effects in social adjustment were paying off, and elementary school teachers were saying they’re more cooperative, they’re doing better with peers and they’re adjusting better to the classroom setting. The other area was parent involvement — teachers were seeing parents being more involved in their kids’ schooling.”
For this most recent phase of the study focused on high school, Bierman and her colleagues — Child Study Center statistician Brenda Heinrichs and College of Health and Human Development faculty members Janet Welsh, Damon Jones and Max Crowley — had students and their parents independently complete an assessment describing school behavior issues such as getting into trouble with teachers and breaking school rules. Teachers, meanwhile, were tasked with describing students’ rule-breaking, fighting and non-compliance frequency, as well as assessing internalizing problems including worry, unhappiness and depression.
In addition, the researchers obtained student grades and calculated GPAs on a four-point scale. They also determined whether students graduated on time based on student records and interviews.
Once analyzed, the data revealed students who received the REDI intervention experienced significantly fewer high school behavioral problems and emotional symptoms than children in the control group.
“We were now seeing reductions in teacher-reported emotional symptoms like anxiety,” Bierman said. “The preschool intervention had built a protective capacity for kids to better manage the social pressures and emotional demands of adolescence.”
While the researchers didn’t find any direct effects on academic outcomes, they were able to make connections between improved social-emotional behavior and higher GPAs and on-time graduation, Bierman said.
“Our findings suggest that when you boost early social-emotional skills, the big payoff is going to be sustained improvements in social-emotional and behavioral adjustment that is going to have a more subtle, cascading effect on your ability to focus and finish school,” she said.
The study continues as the students have moved into young adulthood. Bierman and her team are currently analyzing data for the participants at ages 18 to 19 and 21 to 22, while collecting data for ages 23 to 24. The goal now is to see how those skills have benefited them in the college classroom and/or the workplace.
“We’ve been fortunate to have the NIH funding, because I don’t know that we’d be able to make the claims of the long-range impact of this social-emotional learning enrichment without it,” Bierman said. “And I think the kids and the families in the study have been amazing partners; they’ve been really willing to hang in there with us.”
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