Background: Evidence-based child sexual and physical abuse prevention programs delivered in schools are needed and require rigorous evaluation of program effects prior to widespread dissemination. The Play it Safe! program is a one-time session delivered by trained facilitators to teach students about recognizing, resisting, and reporting abuse.…

Introduction: Although Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) has been one of the most commonly used prevention programmes in the United States, few evaluations have shown DARE to be an effective prevention program. DARE (or PROERD) is frequently used in Brazil as well. A central component of DARE is police officers serving as instructors. It was…

Sweden has a low prevalence of bullying and Swedish schools are legally obliged to have anti-bullying policies. Many commercial programs are available. A mixed methods, quasi-experimental, concurrent evaluation of 8 programs, chosen from a pool of 21 widely used anti-bullying programs, was planned. Preliminary data, based on 835 stakeholder…

Background: Obesity is a public health concern that disproportionately affects underserved and minority communities. Purpose: To evaluate whether a comprehensive obesity prevention program that targets children and school staff in an underserved Hispanic community affects obesity related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors among both students and…

The promoting responsibility through education and prevention (PREP) program is an after school substance abuse and violence prevention program for at-risk fourth and fifth grade youths in St. Louis, Missouri. Staffed by licensed clinical social workers and professional volunteers, PREP offers cultural cooking classes, yoga, and art as well as…

Interventions that aim to promote social competence, reduce problem behavior, and improve school climate are common at all levels of schooling. This whole-school focus, coupled with researchers' concerns about contamination or spillover effects in evaluations that randomly assign classrooms or students to conditions, as well as advances in…

Group counseling has been highlighted as one effective intervention for at-risk students, yet debate remains as to the comparable efficacy of traditional interventions versus thematic interventions. This study compared two psychosocial educational programs, the PEGS and ARK Programs, designed to help elementary school students with social skills…

In this article, a process evaluation of a school-based, violence intervention program is presented. The program was modeled after bullying prevention programs described by Daniel Olweus (1993) whose components were implemented to achieve student safety goals. The process evaluation instrument used in this study was developed by a rural Midwestern…

The 4Rs Program (Reading, Writing, Respect and Resolution) is a "dual focus" whole school universal intervention designed to promote literacy development and social-emotional learning, that is currently being rigorously evaluated using a school-randomized trial of 18 elementary schools (9 intervention, 9 control) in New York City. The…

The Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (BPP) is an internationally recognized school-based bullying prevention program. This project sought to evaluate pilot implementation of the program in one urban district using fidelity of implementation, bullying incident density (BID), student surveys, and serious incident reports as process and outcome…

This research evaluates an anti-bullying program, Dare to Care: Bully Proofing Your School. Students in Grades 4-6 (N = 197, 77 boys, 120 girls) from four Calgary elementary schools completed the Colorado School Climate Survey (Garrity, Jens, Porter, Sager, & Short-Camilli, 2000) and the Provictim Scale-Short Version (Rigby & Slee, 1991).…

There is now ample evidence that teachers tend to make substantial modifications to both the prescribed content and methods of the curricula they administer, and that such modifications are likely to attenuate curricula effects. We examine the fidelity with which teachers implement "Protecting You, Protecting Me," an underage alcohol use…

The purpose of this study was to contribute to and strengthen previous work that examined the long-lasting effects of Reading Recovery in statewide efforts aimed at bolstering early literacy achievement and reducing early learning difficulties. Specifically, the study explored the literacy achievement of Reading Recovery participants whose series…