Enlisting Peer Cooperation and Prosociality in the Service of Substance Use Prevention in Middle School

Sponsor

Oregon Research Institute (Other)

Overall Status

Completed

CT.gov ID

NCT03119415

Collaborator

Michigan State University (Other)

2,064

Enrollment

Location

Arms

Actual Duration (Months)

Patients Per Site Per Month

Study Details

Study Description

Brief Summary

Students' cooperative and prosocial behavior is vital to their social and academic success and to the quality of a school's social environment. This project will evaluate an instructional technique that could benefit students and schools by encouraging higher levels of prosocial behavior among students and promoting social integration and inclusion, particularly for marginalized students. The instructional technique is called "cooperative learning" which involves students working in groups toward shared academic goals. Previous research indicates that cooperative learning promotes social acceptance and increases academic engagement and achievement. However, it has not been evaluated as a technique to reduce student behavioral problems and promote greater school safety. There is strong reason to believe that it will have these benefits, since cooperative learning brings together students from diverse social groups and provides them the opportunity to work together toward shared goals in a positive setting.

Condition or Disease	Intervention/Treatment	Phase
Social Behavior	Behavioral: Cooperative Learning	N/A

Detailed Description

A key contributing factor to the initiation and escalation of substance use during early adolescence is affiliation with deviant peers. These affiliations often arise when socially isolated and rejected youth aggregate and reinforce substance use and other deviant activity within the group (i.e., "deviant peer clustering"). Even though the field has developed a number of efficacious prevention programs, few have demonstrated strong effects on deviant peer clustering. Further, on a national level, substance use among adolescents continues to be high, suggesting that a fresh approach to prevention with a renewed focus on the peer context is needed to create a broad, sustainable public health impact.

Existing programs have proven difficult to disseminate with fidelity, often due to their complex design or the significant expenditures required for curricula, materials, and training. To realize broader public health benefits, an approach that integrates scientific knowledge across domains must be applied to develop and test programs that address root causes of youth substance use, are less complex and expensive to implement, are more flexible and adaptable to local conditions, and once established, can spread.

This proposal represents an approach to prevention in which evolutionary theory provides a unifying theoretical framework, which implies that diverse problems are due to social environments that are unfavorable for the expression of prosocial behaviors, instead eliciting a variety of self-oriented or exploitative behaviors. Systematic efforts to reduce multiple problems among youth (e.g., substance use, risky sex, depression, academic failure, etc.) need to look beyond the immediate issues to the social conditions that make the entire range of problems more likely. Programs should focus on modifying key social environments to nurture prosocial behavior and minimize the toxic or stressful conditions that give rise to behavioral problems in youth.

The investigators propose to integrate a few simple, flexible, and powerful prevention strategies that have proven value in establishing a social context conducive to positive peer group development. This project will apply cooperative learning and behavioral kernels to reduce social rejection and isolation, promote new friendships among youth from different social groups, and encourage greater levels of prosocial behavior. This should create a positive feedback loop in which the social and behavioral processes "amplify" one another to bring significant change to the school social context, interrupting deviant peer clustering and addressing a key root cause of escalations in substance use and related problem behavior. With this approach, the investigators anticipate a simple, straightforward implementation, greater sustainability, and opportunities for the program to spread through sharing of best practices among teachers. This project will conduct a small-scale randomized controlled trial involving 12 middle schools in the state of Oregon.

Aim 1a of the project is to evaluate the main effects of the program on both prosocial behavior and substance use. The investigators will also examine effects on secondary outcomes, including delinquent and high-risk sexual behavior, teasing and harassment, depression, school attendance, and academic achievement. The project will include an assessment of program fidelity, which will be incorporated into data analyses. Aim 1b of the project is to explore links among peer rejection, prosocial behavior, and substance use over time in an attempt to determine the direction of effects, which can inform both developmental theory and future intervention design.

Aim 2 will evaluate social network changes as a mediator of intervention effects. The investigators will use longitudinal social network analysis (RSiena) to examine a variety of processes as mediators of effects, including deviant peer clustering. This analyses will provide (1) fresh insight into the processes by which deviant peer groups form, how they impact substance use and related problem behavior, and the ways in which prevention programs may be able to counteract or interrupt these processes, (2) exploration of the social mechanisms by which prosocial behavior is disseminated across a network, and (3) an indication of whether the alteration of contextual norms in favor of prosocial behavior can create a clustering process driven by prosocial behavior.

Study Design

Study Type:

Interventional

Actual Enrollment :

2064 participants

Allocation:

Randomized

Intervention Model:

Parallel Assignment

Intervention Model Description:

This research is a comparison between the Cooperative Learning program and services as usual. Approximately twelve middle schools will be randomized to a waitlist-control condition. The intervention group will receive training in Cooperative Learning immediately and the waitlist-control group will receive training at the end fo the project. Teachers will be given training on the basics of Cooperative Learning and will be supported in their efforts to implement it in their classrooms. No curricular changes will be required. The initial training will last two or three days and will confirm to the professional development calendar of the intervention schools (selected at random). The implementation of Cooperative Learning is expected to be on-going for the full duration of the project (two years).This research is a comparison between the Cooperative Learning program and services as usual. Approximately twelve middle schools will be randomized to a waitlist-control condition. The intervention group will receive training in Cooperative Learning immediately and the waitlist-control group will receive training at the end fo the project. Teachers will be given training on the basics of Cooperative Learning and will be supported in their efforts to implement it in their classrooms. No curricular changes will be required. The initial training will last two or three days and will confirm to the professional development calendar of the intervention schools (selected at random). The implementation of Cooperative Learning is expected to be on-going for the full duration of the project (two years).

Masking:

None (Open Label)

Primary Purpose:

Prevention

Official Title:

Enlisting Peer Cooperation and Prosociality in the Service of Substance Use Prevention in Middle School

Actual Study Start Date :

Jul 1, 2016

Actual Primary Completion Date :

Jun 30, 2018

Actual Study Completion Date :

Jun 30, 2020

Arms and Interventions

Arm	Intervention/Treatment
Experimental: Cooperative Learning Teachers in intervention schools are training in cooperative learning (CL).	Behavioral: Cooperative Learning CL is an umbrella term that includes peer tutoring, reciprocal teaching, collaborative reading, and other methods in which peers help each other learn in small groups. CL is not prescriptive but rather is a conceptual framework within which teachers design their own small-group activities. Johnson, Johnson, and Holubec's approach to CL combines positive interdependence with individual accountability, a high degree of face-to-face social interaction among youth, and support for the development of cooperative social skills. The Johnsons' approach offers teachers the combination of specific cooperative activities and the conceptual tools to create their own lesson plans using positive interdependence.
No Intervention: Business as Usual Schools continue with business as usual.

Arm

Intervention/Treatment

Experimental: Cooperative Learning

Teachers in intervention schools are training in cooperative learning (CL).

Behavioral: Cooperative Learning

CL is an umbrella term that includes peer tutoring, reciprocal teaching, collaborative reading, and other methods in which peers help each other learn in small groups. CL is not prescriptive but rather is a conceptual framework within which teachers design their own small-group activities. Johnson, Johnson, and Holubec's approach to CL combines positive interdependence with individual accountability, a high degree of face-to-face social interaction among youth, and support for the development of cooperative social skills. The Johnsons' approach offers teachers the combination of specific cooperative activities and the conceptual tools to create their own lesson plans using positive interdependence.

No Intervention: Business as Usual

Schools continue with business as usual.

Outcome Measures

Primary Outcome Measures

Substance use [twice a year for two years during 7th and 8th grades]
Tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana; actual use, intentions to use, willingness to use

Secondary Outcome Measures

Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) [twice a year for two years during 7th and 8th grades]
Externalizing, internalizing, and prosocial behavior
Engagement vs. Disaffection with Learning [twice a year for two years during 7th and 8th grades]
Behavioral and emotional engagement in learning
Classroom Life Scale [twice a year for two years during 7th and 8th grades]
Student academic support
University of Illinois Bully Scale [twice a year for two years during 7th and 8th grades]
Bullying and victimization

Eligibility Criteria

Criteria

Ages Eligible for Study:

N/A and Older

Sexes Eligible for Study:

All

Accepts Healthy Volunteers:

Yes

Inclusion Criteria:

All students in participating schools in the 7th grade (first year) and 8th grade (second year)

Exclusion Criteria:

None

Contacts and Locations

Locations

	Site	City	State	Country	Postal Code
1	Oregon Research Insititute	Eugene	Oregon	United States	97403

Sponsors and Collaborators

Oregon Research Institute
Michigan State University

Investigators

None specified.

Study Documents (Full-Text)

None provided.

More Information

Publications

Responsible Party:

Oregon Research Institute

ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier:

NCT03119415

Other Study ID Numbers:

AA024275

First Posted:

Apr 18, 2017

Last Update Posted:

Jul 23, 2020

Last Verified:

Jul 1, 2020

Individual Participant Data (IPD) Sharing Statement:

Plan to Share IPD:

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated Drug Product:

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated Device Product:

Additional relevant MeSH terms:

Substance-Related Disorders

Study Results

No Results Posted as of Jul 23, 2020