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Improving Young Children’s Social and Emotional Competence: A Randomized Trial of the Preschool “PATHS” Curriculum

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This paper reports the results from a randomized clinical trial evaluating an adaptation of the Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies curriculum (PATHS) for preschool-age children in Head Start. PATHS is a universal, teacher-taught social-emotional curriculum that is designed to improve children’s social competence and reduce problem behavior. Twenty classrooms in two Pennsylvania communities participated in the study. Teachers in the 10 intervention classrooms implemented weekly lessons and extension activities across a 9-month period. Child assessments and teacher and parent reports of child behavior assessments were collected at the beginning and end of the school year. Analysis of covariance was used to control for baseline differences between the groups and pretest scores on each of the outcome measures. The results suggest that after exposure to PATHS, intervention children had higher emotion knowledge skills and were rated by parents and teachers as more socially competent compared to peers. Further, teachers rated intervention children as less socially withdrawn at the end of the school year compared to controls.

Editors’ Strategic Implications:n Findings from this and other randomized clinical trials confirm that the Preschool PATHS program is clearly a promising practice for improving children’s social and emotional competence. Head Start and school programs will find these multi-informant data to be of interest as they consider a curriculum to help prepare children for school entry.

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Notes

  1. The monthly coordinator ratings of implementation quality included 13 items that were rated on a 4-point Likert scale. These ratings were part of a process evaluation. No reliability data was collected so they were no used in outcome analyses. There was some variation across teachers on the scores for each dimension. The fidelity score ranged from 2.79 to 3.96. The generalization score ranged from 2.78 to 3.93 and the openness to consultation ranged from 2.57 to 4.0. The overall means for each of these dimensions were high (3.62, 3.37, and 3.67, respectively), indicating that teachers delivered the curriculum as designed in the manual and were positively engaged with coordinators in the implementation process.

  2. Results of the confirmatory factor analysis are available from the authors.

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Acknowledgments

This project was supported by a Head Start/University Partnership Grant (#90YD0063) awarded to the third author by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. We would like to thank the administration and teaching staff of the Lycoming-Clinton Head Start and Capital Area Head Start programs for collaborating with us on this project and in particular, acknowledge the tremendous support and dedication of Anne Doerr, Shahanaz Mondamipour, Vickie Dodds, Alison Rosen, and Romayne Turner.

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  1. Prevention Research Center, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

    Celene E. Domitrovich & Mark T. Greenberg

  2. Social Development Research Group, School of Social Work, University of Washington, Washington, USA

    Rebecca C. Cortes

  3. The Pennsylvania State University, Prevention Research Center, 109 South Henderson Building, University Park, PA, 16801, USA

    Celene E. Domitrovich

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Domitrovich, C.E., Cortes, R.C. & Greenberg, M.T. Improving Young Children’s Social and Emotional Competence: A Randomized Trial of the Preschool “PATHS” Curriculum. J Primary Prevent 28, 67–91 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10935-007-0081-0

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