Research
The development of the KooLKIDS Social Emotional Learning program has been enabled by ongoing federal funding from the Australian Research Council. The main aim of the research has been to develop and evaluate an innovative social emotional learning program to empower children to live well with themselves and others by knowing their strengths and their emotions and by learning empathy and friendship skills.
The KooLKIDS Social Emotional Learning Program has been developed as a universal program that addresses social emotional learning skills for children aged 8 to 11 years. It has a solid theoretical and empirically driven background. Drawing primarily from an emotion regulation framework and the social emotional learning and resilience literature, KooLKIDS aims to identify and highlight strengths, teach emotional regulation skills and empathy, and provide sound social and friendship skills to assist children to live well with themselves and others. This clear theoretical underpinning is vital to provide the most effective intervention program.
The KooLKIDS program aligns with the Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority's (ACARA) personal and social capabilities of the national curriculum. It is delivered by trained classroom teachers across a school term or semester.
Several trials have been conducted on the efficacy of the program, and are detailed in the list of publications.
As an example, Carroll et al. (2022) details a large evaluation trial over a two-year period which was conducted to investigate the impact of the KooLKIDS program on participating students' behavioural, emotional and social competence. Specifically, the study sought to determine whether student's social and emotional competence (namely self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making) and prosocial behaviours improved as a result of completing the KooKIDS program and whether there were any broader benefits in terms of educational outcomes for children. Students in Grades 4, 5 and 6 took part in the study, as well as their classroom teachers and parents. The study included 36 class groups, with 52.6% of participating students in Grade 4, 33.8% in Grade 5 and 13.4% in Grade 6. Data were collected on a total of 912 students. The age of the students ranged from 8 to 12 years, with a mean age of 9.64 years (SD = .787). Over half of the students were female (56.6%). This study utilized an independent groups wait-list control design, whereby schools that received the intervention (KoolKIDS condition) were compared to a control group of schools that did not receive the intervention until after the study (Waitlist-control condition). Participating teachers, students and parents in both conditions completed questionnaire measures at two time points. The intervention condition was assessed before and after completing the KooLKIDS program. The control condition was assessed before and after an approximate 12 week waiting period (of no intervention), after which time, they received the KooLKIDS program.
The findings indicate that the program can lead to significant teacher-rated improvements in social and emotional competence amongst children aged 8 to 11 years. In addition, the KooLKIDS program produced significant increases in pro-social behaviour amongst the children who participated, and decreases in externalising behaviours along with a broader range of problematic behaviours, with a trend towards a reduction in internalising behaviours. Although there was no impact evident regarding more general learning and achievement outcomes, this is not surprising given such improvements are likely to take a longer period of time to become evident.