Experimental Evaluation of a Program to Foster Socioemotional Competence of Children in Third Grade and Their Teachers

Over the last 20 years the science of learning and economics of education has uplifted the relevance of socioemotional competence both for learning and other societal outcomes. Findings from neurobiology have illuminated how environmental factors such as poverty, exposure to stress or experiencing trauma, affect children's development of brain systems that support neurocognitive functions such as language, memory and self-regulation and therefore affecting their behavior, lifelong learning, and health (Immordino-Yang \& Damasio, 2007; Twardosz \& Lutzker, 2010; Noble, 2014; Chapko, 2015; Kolb \& Gibb, 2015; Thomason \& Marusak, 2017). Findings from the economics of education consistently indicates positive relationships between noncognitive skills and societal outcomes such as educational attainment (Farrington et al., 2012; Levin, 2012; Garcia, 2015), labor productivity and adult earnings (Casner-Lotto \& Barrington, 2006; Heckman, Stixrud \& Urzua, 2006; Murnane et al., 2001), and civic participation (Almlund, Duckworth, Heckman \& Kautz, 2011). This has led educators to pursue new strategies to support the social and emotional competence of children as well as their academic learning. Socioemotional learning (SEL hereafter) is the process through which individuals acquire socioemotional competence, the "process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions" (Niemi, 2020).

The 10-minutes project is a pilot study to assess the impact of a SEL program for children in 3th and 4th grade and their teachers called 10-minutes.

The program is a curriculum that provides 10-minute activities (thus the name) for children to be implemented by the teachers daily throughout the school year. The activities do not require prior knowledge of teachers on SEL development, nor planning or material preparation. Each activity is presented along with knowledge for teachers on how to develop socioemotional skills in children. The curriculum is complemented by professional development for teachers on the development of their own socioemotional competencies.

The 10-minute project is a pilot study, primarily exploratory. It will provide data on the feasibility of the program, and its acceptability. The 10-minute project also has a quantitative study developed to evaluate whether the 10-minute curriculum and an expanded version with professional development activities for teachers or counselors, 10-minute plus, at third grade would improve students and teachers' socioemotional competence. The randomized control trail involves 30 schools in Chile, matched on socioeconomic measures, size, and urban/rural conditions, assigned randomly to 1 of 3 conditions. Ten schools will receive 10-minutes only, the SEL curriculum taught by teachers or school counselors, during the 2024 and 2025 school years. Ten schools will receive 10-minutes plus during the 2024 school year. Ten schools will serve as "delayed program" control, which will have the opportunity to receive the program (10-minutes plus) after the final follow-up. To examine the possibility of fade-out of the effects of the SEL intervention on students, the first experimental condition (10-minutes only) will be randomly divided into two groups, one will receive the intervention for one year only, whereas the second one will receive the intervention for two consecutive years. Surveys will be used to collect data on student, classroom, and teacher outcomes in the 30 schools in fall 2024 (baseline), spring 2024 (first follow-up), and among fourth grade students in the same schools in spring 2025 (final follow-up). The intervention will take place after the baseline data is collected in March and April 2024.

It is expected the program will yield positive effects on the experimental groups (both students and teachers), and effects are expected to be greater in the group offered the 10-minutes plus intervention which entails both a curriculum for children and professional development for teachers, than the effects in the group offered the 10-minutes curriculum exclusively. If the program proves to be effective, then cost-benefit analyses will follow to assess the efficiency of the program. The estimated benefits of the program are expected to be lower than the costs.

Why this program and study matters? This program and study are relevant for two main reasons: First, children and adults are facing a mental health crisis in Chile and elsewhere (Humphreys \& Irarrazaval, 2022; World Health Organization, 2022), and SEL programs have proven to be an effective way to increase children and adults' socioemotional competence (Durlak et al., in press), fundamental skills to cope with environmental stressors and daily challenges. Second, Chilean teachers have received little to no training in pre-service education (Milici \& Alcalay, 2020) and admit not having the necessary tools to tackle SEL in schools (Berger et al., 2009). This project presents an intervention that helps tackle both challenges and present a robust study design to argue for the causal impact of the intervention on children's and teachers' socioemotional competencies.