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Um compasso para aprender: Evaluating the impact of a social-emotional learning program in Brazilian primary schools

Fri, March 22, 8:00 to 9:30am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 329

Integrative Statement

Around the world, there is growing interest in supporting children’s social-emotional development as a means for enhancing both individual and societal wellbeing (OECD, 2015; UNESCO, 2017). Classroom-based social-emotional learning (SEL) programs have been shown to have significant and lasting impacts on children’s social-emotional skills, attitudes, and behaviors (Durlak et al., 2011; Taylor, Oberle, Durlak, & Weissberg, 2017). At the same time, research on school-based SEL programs comes predominantly from the United States and nearly exclusively from high-income countries. In the present study, we examine the impact of a classroom-based SEL program called Programa Compasso (PC) on students’ social-emotional and vocabulary outcomes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We also explore the degree to which the effectiveness of the PC intervention may vary based on child, family, school, and neighborhood characteristics. In particular, we focus on whether impacts were larger or smaller for children facing community violence, which was particularly prevalent in Rio during the intervention year and may have interfered with program implementation.

Outcome data for this study were collected from 3,022 third- and fifth-grade children (M age = 9.39yrs, 50% female) in 90 primary schools in Rio. Schools were matched pairwise based on a measure (IDEB) that includes schools’ previous test scores, failure rates, size, and region, and then randomly assigned to either receive the school-wide PC intervention (treatment) or to business as usual (control). PC includes weekly, 30-minute lesson plans and accompanying materials (e.g., puppets, posters) implemented by teachers targeting students’ self-regulation, executive function, emotion knowledge, and social problem solving. Data on children’s social-emotional and vocabulary skills were collected at the beginning and end of the school year (baseline and follow-up, respectively) using a set of instruments that were locally translated, adapted, and pilot tested (see Table 1 notes for details). Prior to analysis, we confirmed the psychometric appropriateness of all child outcomes using confirmatory factor analysis and classical test theory.

Results of two-level hierarchical linear regression models are shown in Table 1. Using an intent-to-treat approach, we find significant or marginally significant impacts of random assignment to PC on five of 14 child outcomes tested. Specifically, after receiving PC for approximately six months, children in treatment schools demonstrated lower teacher-reported conduct and peer problems, higher self-reported feelings of safety in school, and greater accuracy on a tablet-based executive function task relative to their peers in control schools. Interestingly, treatment group students also reported significantly lower levels of school enjoyment than those in the control group. No impacts were observed for students’ emotion knowledge, working memory, or vocabulary.

Overall, the effects of the school-based PC intervention on Brazilian students’ social-emotional outcomes are mixed. The final presentation will include updated models that: (1) use multiple imputation to address missingness, (2) explore impact variation based on child, home, school, and neighborhood characteristics, and (3) use a treatment-on-treated approach to understand the effects of differential dosage attributable to community violence. We will also discuss the implications of this work for expanding classroom-based SEL programming to diverse and resource-constrained global contexts.

Authors