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Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS) and Elementary School Aged Children’s Aggression: Results from a Cluster Randomized Trial

  • Original Article
  • Published:
American Journal of Community Psychology

Abstract

This study reports on aggressive outcomes from a cluster randomized trial of the Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS) curriculum. Fourteen elementary schools were randomly assigned to intervention or control condition and third grade students were followed through the fifth grade. Teacher and self-reports of student aggression, conduct problems, delinquency, acting out problems, and social information processing (SIP) variables were collected. Linear change for each of the SIP variables was noted with control students demonstrating increased normative beliefs about aggression, increased aggressive social problem solving, increased hostile attribution bias, and increased aggressive interpersonal negotiation strategies over time while PATHS students remained relatively stable. Teachers reported significant curvilinear change in student aggression, conduct problems, and acting out behavior problems; all favoring PATHS students.

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Notes

  1. Per use of IES restricted use data license, sample sizes must be rounded to the nearest 10 for data collected via the national evaluation protocol.

  2. As pointed out by one anonymous reviewer, self-report reliability estimates for younger students are likely to improve over time as students age and become more experienced with the measures. While not typically linear, alphas did improve over time for a number of these measures (results available from first author).

  3. With the current outcomes, post hoc power analyses suggests that power to detect a small effect (.20) using a probability of .05 ranged from .30–.61 and improved to .45–.74 with a probability level of .10 (Spybrook et al. 2011).

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences of the US Department of Education and the Division of Violence Prevention in the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (R305L030165). Hugh F. Crean and Deborah B. Johnson served as co-principal investigators. We wish to thank William C. Work, Emma Forbes-Jones, Marc Fraser, and Steven Day for comments on earlier versions of this article. We also thank the students, parents, and teachers of the participating schools.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Nursing, University of Rochester, Helen Wood Hall 2.W213, 601 Elmwood Avenue, Box SON, Rochester, NY, 14642, USA

    Hugh F. Crean

  2. Children’s Institute, Rochester, NY, USA

    Deborah B. Johnson

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  1. Hugh F. Crean
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  2. Deborah B. Johnson
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Correspondence to Hugh F. Crean.

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Crean, H.F., Johnson, D.B. Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS) and Elementary School Aged Children’s Aggression: Results from a Cluster Randomized Trial. Am J Community Psychol 52, 56–72 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-013-9576-4

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