Program Profile: Rochester Resilience Project (RRP)

This is a school-based intervention to improve the social-emotional and behavioral skills of young children at risk for mental health disorders and substance abuse. This program is rated Promising. The program had a statistically significant, positive effect on children’s task orientation, behavior control, assertiveness, and peer social skills. The program was also associated with a statistically significant decline in the average number of suspensions and office disciplinary referrals.

A Promising rating implies that implementing the program may result in the intended outcome(s).

Program Goals/Target Population

The goal of the Rochester Resilience Project (RRP) was to prevent mental health problems and substance abuse by teaching young children social–emotional and behavioral skills. The program targeted children who were identified through a population-based screening of all kindergarten through third graders in two urban schools as having problems in at least two of the following domains: behavioral, social–emotional, or on-task learning behaviors at school.

Key Personnel

Four female paraprofessionals employed by the school district were trained as Resilience Mentors. The research team instructed teachers on how to screen for eligible children.

Program Activities

The intervention consisted of 14 weekly 25-minute, one-to-one sessions in which Resilience Mentors taught youth a hierarchically ordered set of skills. The hierarchically ordered skills consisted of 1) monitoring of one’s own and others’ emotions, 2) self-control and reducing escalation of emotions, and 3) maintaining control and regaining equilibrium.

Resilience Mentors taught children using adult modeling and verbal instruction. A standardized structure was used to implement each lesson. Teachers received an orientation to the intervention at the start of the school year. Once mentors and children started meeting, mentors held meetings every other month with teachers to establish goals and to identify classroom contexts in which the children could apply their skills. Parents were also invited to a 30-minute orientation to the intervention.

Program Theory

The intervention was informed by a model in which problems in emotional regulation contribute to difficulties in behavior, mood, and social relationships (Wyman et al. 2004). Learning theories and research on development of self-regulation processes were used to derive techniques to teach emotional regulation to young children. These techniques included adult modeling, verbal instruction, and adult–child role play.

Study 1

Wyman and colleagues (2010) evaluated an intervention (the Rochester Resilience Project; RRP) designed to prevent mental health problems and substance abuse in youth. Eligible participants consisted of children from kindergarten to the third grade who exhibited problems in at least two of the following domains: behavioral, social–emotional, or on-task learning behaviors at school. Over the course of 2 years, teachers screened children in their classrooms for eligibility. Of the 285 children deemed eligible, 261 children were enrolled in the study. These children were separated by gender and, in the second year, also by baseline behavior problems. They were then randomly assigned within their classrooms to either the treatment treatment group or to the waitlist control group. The intervention took place in a private setting during the school day. To reduce the time burden on teachers, the screening measure was changed from a 32-item questionnaire in year 1 to a 13-item questionnaire in year 2. There were no statistically significant differences in the baseline measures between children screened at year 1 and year 2.

About 13 percent of the sample was lost to attrition before the study began, resulting in a total sample of 226 children. The sample contained 111 children in the treatment group and 115 children in the control group. The final composition of the sample was 61.5 percent Black, 25.7 percent Hispanic, 8.4 percent white, 4.4 percent other race/ethnicity, and 54.4 percent female.

The study compared treatment and control groups at the beginning of the intervention and again at the end of the 4-month intervention. The Teacher–Child Rating Scale (Hightower et al. 1986) was used to assess four domains of each child’s behavior: 1) task orientation, 2) behavior control, 3) assertiveness versus withdrawn behavior, and 4) peer social skills. Other outcomes measured included the number of office disciplinary referrals and suspensions received by each child.

Children in the treatment and control groups did not differ statistically significantly on outcome measures with one exception: teachers rated children in the intervention group as lower on behavior control compared with children in the control group.

A multilevel linear mixed-effects model was used to examine the impact of the intervention on the Teacher–Child Rating Scales. These analyses accounted for the nesting of students within classrooms and schools and also controlled for baseline scores on the outcome measures as well as for differences in grade level, gender, and race/ethnicity. The study used zero-inflated Poisson regression to analyze the impact of the intervention on office disciplinary referrals and suspensions. These analyses controlled for student gender as well as disciplinary referrals or suspensions received in the 3 months before the start of the intervention.

The research team trained teachers on how to screen children for program eligibility. Resilience Mentors received training and a manual to guide their delivery of lessons (Cross and Wyman 2004). Mentors were trained to calibrate the level of support that each child required over time, and to use reinforcement and feedback to successfully transfer skills to the children. The mentors also collaborated with teachers to identify classroom situations in which children could be reminded to use the new skills they were taught, although teachers were not trained to coach children in the use of the new skills (Wyman et al. 2010).

Additional information about procedures for measuring implementer fidelity for the Rochester Resilience Project (RRP) have been reported by Cross and West (2011) and Cross and colleagues (2014).

Subgroup Analysis

A newer version of the Rochester Resilience Project (RRP) has been developed and an evaluation of this version of the program is forthcoming (personal communication, Peter Wyman). One notable difference between the newer version of the program and the version reviewed for CrimeSolutions is an increase in the number of individual skill lessons from 14 to 24. The newer version of the RRP also contains an added component of 12 home or in-school visits (40 to 50 minutes each) for parents to introduce the specific emotional regulation skills, engage parents as teachers of skills, and incorporate skills into family life. Parents are taught to use parent–child activities, which cumulatively center on the three core skill sets. Finally, the newer version of the program contains a universal component consisting of brief classroom lessons co-taught by Resilience Mentors and teachers, covering emotion vocabulary and emotional regulation skills. Each year (over a 2-year span) teachers are offered eight lessons (usually 10 to 15 minutes each). The purpose of the lessons is to build emotional competencies in all children and to increase support for teacher reinforcement of the use of emotion-regulation strategies by children receiving the indicated components.

With regard to subgroup findings, Wyman and colleagues (2010) conducted analyses on age (grade level), gender, and baseline problem behavior. In regard to gender, the impact of RRP on peer social skills varied. RRP girls showed a statistically significant improvement in social skills, whereas RRP boys did not show any changes in social skills, at the 4-month follow up. There were no other statistically significant differences between RRP girls and boys at the follow up. There were also no statistically significant differences between older and younger children who participated in RPP, or between children with higher baseline behavioral problems and children with lower bas

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

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

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Evidence Ratings for Outcomes

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Evidence Ratings for Outcomes

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Why might a practice's outcome ratings differ from the ratings of specific programs encompassed by that practice?