Program Profile: The GREAT School Program

This is a school-based intervention designed to promote nonviolent goals and beliefs and to discourage aggression. The program is rated Ineffective. There were no statistically significant impacts on individual norms for aggression or nonviolence, goals and strategies supporting aggression or nonviolence, or beliefs supporting fighting or nonviolence.

An Ineffective rating implies that implementing the program is unlikely to result in the intended outcome(s).

This program's rating is based on evidence that includes either 1) one study conducted in multiple sites; or 2) two or three studies, each conducted at a different site. Learn about how we make the multisite determination.

Program Goals/Program Theory

The GREAT (Guiding Responsibility and Expectations for Adolescents for Today and Tomorrow) School Program was developed within a social–cognitive framework approach to promote problem-solving skills, self-efficacy for nonviolence, goals and strategies supporting nonviolence, and individual and school norms against the use of violence. The GREAT curriculum was adapted from the Responding in Peaceful and Positive Ways curriculum for sixth graders to include additional themes such as culture and context, self-efficacy for nonviolence, promoting prosocial goals, and positive school norms.

Program Components

The GREAT School Program is composed of 20 weekly sessions that provide instruction and practice in the use of a social–cognitive problem-solving model. The program instructs students on how to avoid dangerous situations, ignore teasing, ask for help, talk things through, defuse situations, and be helpful to peers.

Those who implement the program use behavioral repetition and mental rehearsal of the skills, small-group activities, experiential-learning techniques, and didactic modalities to increase students’ awareness and use of nonviolent options in order to alter their attitudes toward and engagement in aggressive behavior.

The GREAT Teacher Program is composed of a 2-day, 12-hour workshop and 10 consultation/support meetings that focus on increasing teacher awareness of different forms of aggression and associated risk factors while promoting strategies for improving classroom management, reducing aggression, and assisting students who are victimized.

Study

The Multisite Violence Prevention Project (2008) conducted a quasi-experimental study on the effects of the GREAT (Guiding Responsibility and Expectations for Adolescents for Today and Tomorrow) School Program on outcome measures of aggression and nonviolent behaviors for 8th grade students from 37 schools in Chicago, Ill.; Durham, N.C.; northeastern Georgia; and Richmond, Va.

Schools in the evaluation had a high percentage of students from low-income families based on eligibility for the federal free or reduced lunch program. The study sample included mostly minority (48 percent Black, 23 percent Hispanic) boys and girls (49 percent and 51 percent, respectively). The program was implemented over two cohorts starting in 2001.

Schools were randomized into four conditions: universal intervention, selective intervention, combined (universal and selective) intervention, and a no-intervention control. The universal intervention (treatment) group received the GREAT School Program. The selective intervention group received a 15-week family intervention in groups of 4 to 8 high-risk students and their guardians.

Data was collected from students during the fall and spring of their 6th grade year and in the spring during the following 2 school years. Data measures included eight social–cognitive constructs targeted by the GREAT School Program. Those constructs included individual norms for aggression and for nonviolent behavior: beliefs supporting fighting and nonviolent responses, goals and strategies supporting aggression and nonviolent alternatives, self-efficacy for nonviolent responses, and social skills. No subgroup analyses were conducted.

Interventionists were graduate students in a related field (e.g., counseling, clinical psychology) and former teachers who competed 36 hours of training. After each session, interventionists completed a checklist to document whether major lesson elements were delivered as intended and rated the student’s engagement in the lesson.

These sources were used in the development of the program profile: