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Supporting Preschoolers’ Mental Health and Academic Learning through the PROMEHS Program: A Training Study

There is compelling evidence that early school intervention programs enhance children’s development of life skills, with a positive knock-on effect on their behaviors and academic outcomes. To date, most universal interventions have displayed gains in children’s social-emotional competencies with a...

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Autores principales: Conte, Elisabetta, Cavioni, Valeria, Ornaghi, Veronica, Agliati, Alessia, Gandellini, Sabina, Santos, Margarida Frade, Santos, Anabela Caetano, Simões, Celeste, Grazzani, Ilaria
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10297171/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37371301
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/children10061070
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author Conte, Elisabetta
Cavioni, Valeria
Ornaghi, Veronica
Agliati, Alessia
Gandellini, Sabina
Santos, Margarida Frade
Santos, Anabela Caetano
Simões, Celeste
Grazzani, Ilaria
author_facet Conte, Elisabetta
Cavioni, Valeria
Ornaghi, Veronica
Agliati, Alessia
Gandellini, Sabina
Santos, Margarida Frade
Santos, Anabela Caetano
Simões, Celeste
Grazzani, Ilaria
author_sort Conte, Elisabetta
collection PubMed
description There is compelling evidence that early school intervention programs enhance children’s development of life skills, with a positive knock-on effect on their behaviors and academic outcomes. To date, most universal interventions have displayed gains in children’s social-emotional competencies with a limited reduction in problem behaviors. This may depend on programs’ curricula focused to a greater extent on preschoolers’ social-emotional competencies rather than problem behaviors. Promoting Mental Health at Schools (PROMEHS) is a European, school-based, universal mental health program explicitly focused on both promoting students’ mental health and preventing negative conduct by adopting a whole-school approach. In this study, we set out to evaluate the effectiveness of the program for Italian and Portuguese preschoolers. We recruited 784 children (age range = 4–5 years), assigning them to either an experimental group (six months’ participation in the PROMEHS program under the guidance of their teachers, who had received ad hoc training) or a waiting list group (no intervention). We found that PROMEHS improved preschoolers’ social-emotional learning (SEL) competencies, prosocial behavior, and academic outcomes. The more practical activities were carried out at school, the more children’s SEL competencies increased, and the more their internalizing and externalizing behaviors decreased. Furthermore, marginalized and disadvantaged children were those who benefited most from the program, displaying both greater improvements in SEL and more marked decreases in internalizing problems compared to the rest of the sample.
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spelling pubmed-102971712023-06-28 Supporting Preschoolers’ Mental Health and Academic Learning through the PROMEHS Program: A Training Study Conte, Elisabetta Cavioni, Valeria Ornaghi, Veronica Agliati, Alessia Gandellini, Sabina Santos, Margarida Frade Santos, Anabela Caetano Simões, Celeste Grazzani, Ilaria Children (Basel) Article There is compelling evidence that early school intervention programs enhance children’s development of life skills, with a positive knock-on effect on their behaviors and academic outcomes. To date, most universal interventions have displayed gains in children’s social-emotional competencies with a limited reduction in problem behaviors. This may depend on programs’ curricula focused to a greater extent on preschoolers’ social-emotional competencies rather than problem behaviors. Promoting Mental Health at Schools (PROMEHS) is a European, school-based, universal mental health program explicitly focused on both promoting students’ mental health and preventing negative conduct by adopting a whole-school approach. In this study, we set out to evaluate the effectiveness of the program for Italian and Portuguese preschoolers. We recruited 784 children (age range = 4–5 years), assigning them to either an experimental group (six months’ participation in the PROMEHS program under the guidance of their teachers, who had received ad hoc training) or a waiting list group (no intervention). We found that PROMEHS improved preschoolers’ social-emotional learning (SEL) competencies, prosocial behavior, and academic outcomes. The more practical activities were carried out at school, the more children’s SEL competencies increased, and the more their internalizing and externalizing behaviors decreased. Furthermore, marginalized and disadvantaged children were those who benefited most from the program, displaying both greater improvements in SEL and more marked decreases in internalizing problems compared to the rest of the sample. MDPI 2023-06-16 /pmc/articles/PMC10297171/ /pubmed/37371301 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/children10061070 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Conte, Elisabetta
Cavioni, Valeria
Ornaghi, Veronica
Agliati, Alessia
Gandellini, Sabina
Santos, Margarida Frade
Santos, Anabela Caetano
Simões, Celeste
Grazzani, Ilaria
Supporting Preschoolers’ Mental Health and Academic Learning through the PROMEHS Program: A Training Study
title Supporting Preschoolers’ Mental Health and Academic Learning through the PROMEHS Program: A Training Study
title_full Supporting Preschoolers’ Mental Health and Academic Learning through the PROMEHS Program: A Training Study
title_fullStr Supporting Preschoolers’ Mental Health and Academic Learning through the PROMEHS Program: A Training Study
title_full_unstemmed Supporting Preschoolers’ Mental Health and Academic Learning through the PROMEHS Program: A Training Study
title_short Supporting Preschoolers’ Mental Health and Academic Learning through the PROMEHS Program: A Training Study
title_sort supporting preschoolers’ mental health and academic learning through the promehs program: a training study
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10297171/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37371301
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/children10061070
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