Coping Power Program
Study: Lochman & Wells (2002); Lochman & Wells (2003)

Describe how students were selected to participate in the study:

Fourth grade teachers in 17 elementary schools were asked to rate three items about how verbally aggressive, physically aggressive, and disruptive all of the children in their classes were, using scales ranging from 1 to 5. On the basis of these ratings, we determined the 31% most aggressive children across all classes, producing 463 children who were in the pool of potential risk participants, These children were then eligible for random assignment to indicated intervention and control conditions. We received consent to participate in the project from 65% of parents, with an actual sample of 245 moderate- to high-risk indicated children.

Describe how students were identified as being at risk for academic failure (AI) or as having emotional or behavioral difficulties (BI):

The sample of 245 boys were in the top 31% of teachers’ ratings of children’s aggressive and disruptive behaviors.

ACADEMIC INTERVENTION: What percentage of participants were at risk, as measured by one or more of the following criteria:

• below the 30th percentile on local or national norm, or
• identified disability related to the focus of the intervention?

%

BEHAVIORAL INTERVENTION: What percentage of participants were at risk, as measured by one or more of the following criteria:

• emotional disability label,
• placed in an alternative school/classroom,
• non-responsive to Tiers 1 and 2, or
• designation of severe problem behaviors on a validated scale or through observation?

%

Specify which condition is the submitted intervention:

Child component. The child component included 22 intervention sessions in the 1st intervention year and 12 in the 2nd intervention year. Group sessions lasted for 40–50 min per session. The group sessions included 5 to 8 children and were co-led by a grant-funded school-family program specialist and by a school guidance counselor. The Coping Power child component was primarily derived from a previously evaluated 18-session Anger Coping program (Lochman, 1992). The Coping Power child component sessions included a focus on the following items: behavioral and personal goal setting, awareness of feelings and associated physiological arousal, use of coping self-statements, distraction techniques and relaxation methods when provoked and made angry, organizational and study skills, perspective taking and attribution retraining, social problem-solving skills, and dealing with peer pressure and neighborhood based problems by using refusal skills. Parent component. The Coping Power parent component consisted of 16 parent group sessions over the same 16-month intervention period. Eleven parent group sessions were scheduled in the 5th grade year and 5 sessions were scheduled in the 6th grade year. Parents met in groups of at least 12 parents or parent dyads with two coleaders. Assertive attempts were made to include mothers and fathers in parent groups, although in most cases only one parent (usually the mother) attended. For some sessions, the school counselor also joined the leaders in presenting material relevant to parent involvement ins chool. The content of the Coping Power parent component was derived from social-learning-theory–based parent training programs (e.g., Patterson et al., 1992). Parents learned skills for identifying prosocial and disruptive behavioral targets in their children, rewarding appropriate child behaviors, giving effective instructions and establishing age-appropriate rules and expectations for their children, applying effective consequences to negative child behavior, and establishing on-going family communication through weekly family meetings. In addition, parents learned to support the social–cognitive skills that children learn in the Coping Power child component and to use stress-management skills to remain calm and in control during stressful or irritating disciplinary interactions with their children.

Specify which condition is the control condition:

The children in the care as usual condition received services as usual within their schools (brief individual or group counseling from school counselors, following teacher or child self-referral).

If you have a third, competing condition, in addition to your control and intervention condition, identify what the competing condition is (data from this competing condition will not be used):

There were four conditions in this study: Coping Power only (CP; n=59); Coping Power plus Classroom Intervention (CPCL; n=61); Classroom only (CL; n=62); and Control (C; n=63). For the Demographic Information section below, the two Coping POwer conditions have been combined under "Program," and the CL and C conditions have been combined under "Control." All students were in 5th grade when they started the intervention. Classroom intervention. The classroom intervention known as Coping with the Middle School Transitions (CMST) had two components: (a) parent meetings and (b) teacher in-service meetings. The program was designed to promote home-school involvement and to address parents' upcoming concerns about transition to middle school. The teacher intervention component consisted of five 2-hour meetings during the fifth-grade year, with six teachers meeting together with a Coping Power staff member. In the teacher meetings, there was a combination of didactic presentation of information on the topic of that day, and time for teacher problem-solving around the topic, following the format used in prior research on teacher consulting to facilitate children's social competence and self-control (Lochman, Lampron, Gemmer, Harris, & Wyckoff, 1989). The topics for the teacher meetings were: (a) methods for promoting positive parent involvement in the school setting and in their child's education; (b) enhancing children's study skills, abilities to organize work, and completion of homework, including a focus on children's self-control, parent-teacher communications around homework, and children's social bond to school; (c) enhancing children's social competence by emphasizing teacher facilitation of children's emerging social problem-solving strategies; and (d) enhancing children's self-control and self-regulation through conflict-management strategies involving peer negotiation and teacher use of proactive classroom management. The CMST parent meetings consisted of three sessions scheduled during the fifth-grade year and one session during the sixth-grade year. There were one or two classrooms randomly assigned to classroom intervention at each school, and the parent/ caretakers of all of the children in these classrooms were invited to attend each of these meetings. The parent meetings addressed issues related to children's success in school and promoted positive parent involvement with the school and their child; promoting children's successful relations with peers, and what parents could do to promote children's problem solving skills in developing new friends and handling difficult peer situations; and parents' concerns about the middle school transition, and the academic, social and behavioral tasks that children have to master during this transition. These sessions prepared parents for upcoming adolescent issues, relating to peer pressure, deviant peer groups, need for parental monitoring, and emergence of adolescent risk-taking behaviors.

Using the tables that follow, provide data demonstrating comparability of the program group and control group in terms of demographics.

Grade Level

Race–Ethnicity

Socioeconomic Status

Disability Status

ELL Status

Gender

What method was used to determine students' placement in treatment/control groups?

Random

Please describe the assignment method or the process for defining treatment/comparison groups.

Lochman & Wells (2002) p S42: Fourth-grade teachers in 17 elementary schools were asked to rate three items about how verbally aggressive, physically aggressive, and disruptive (indicators of poor selfregulation and poor self-control) all of the children in their classes were, using scales ranging from 1 to 5. This aggression screening system has been used to validly select risk groups in prior research (e.g., Lochman, 1992). Our prior research has found aggressive samples selected in a similar manner from the Durham public schools to have significantly higher parent and teacher ratings of aggressiveness, more observed off-task behavior in the classroom, lower self-esteem, and a higher risk rate for later delinquency and substance use than nonaggressive samples from the same schools (Lochman, 1992). On the basis of these ratings, we determined the 31% most aggressive children across all classes, producing 473 children who were in the pool of potential risk participants. These children were then eligible for random assignment to indicated intervention and control conditions. We received consent to participate in the project from 65% of parents, with an actual sample size of 245 moderate- to high-risk indicated children. Lochman & Wells (2003) p. 499: After the summer baseline assessment, and after students had been assigned to fifth-grade classrooms, the 60 fifth-grade classrooms in the 17 elementary schools were randomly assigned to either the classroom-level intervention or the comparison condition. Each of the 17 schools had at least one class receiving classroom-level intervention and one classroom serving as a comparison classroom, to control for school effects. Lochman, Wells, Qu, & Chen (2013), p. 366: Fourth grade teachers in 17 elementary schools used three items to rate how verbally aggressive, physically aggressive and disruptive all of the children in their classes were (N01540), using 1 to 5 ratings for each item. This aggression screening system has been used to validly select risk groups in prior research (e.g., Lochman 1992). We used these screen scores to identify the 31 % most aggressive children across all classes; 473 children screened as being aggressive became the pool of risk subjects. These children were then eligible for random assignment to indicated intervention and control conditions. We received consent to participate in the project from 65 % of parents, with an actual sample size of 245 moderate to high-risk subjects.

What was the unit of assignment?

Teachers

If other, please specify:

Please describe the unit of assignment:

What unit(s) were used for primary data analysis?

Schools
Teachers
Students
Classes
Other
If other, please specify:

Please describe the unit(s) used for primary data analysis:

How was the program delivered?

Individually
Small Group
Classroom

What were the background, experience, training, and ongoing support of the instructors or interventionists?

The group sessions were co-led by a grant-funded staff school-family program specialist and a school guidance counselor. All grant-funded staff, as well as school counselors, received a 10-hour training program prior to the start of, and during, intervention, and received weekly scheduled supervision of their intervention work

Describe when and how fidelity of treatment information was obtained.

To ensure that intervention components were provided as planned, procedures were formulated for developing and evaluating intervention integrity. Detailed intervention manuals were used for both the Coping Power Child Component and Parent Component, and structured guidelines were used for the classroom CMST interventions. Checklists of planned session objectives were completed by group leaders. These checklists were reviewed by the supervisors in the weekly supervision sessions, and indicated that over 90% of session objectives were delivered.

What were the results on the fidelity-of-treatment implementation measure?

NA

Was the fidelity measure also used in control classrooms?

NA

For any substantively (e.g., effect size ≥ 0.25 for pretest or demographic differences) or statistically significant (e.g., p < 0.05) pretest differences, please describe the extent to which these differences are related to the impact of the treatment. For example, if analyses were conducted to determine that outcomes from this study are due to the intervention and not pretest characteristics, please describe the results of those analyses here.

Please explain any missing data or instances of measures with incomplete pre- or post-test data.

If you have excluded a variable or data that are reported in the study being submitted, explain the rationale for exclusion:

Describe the analyses used to determine whether the intervention produced changes in student outcomes:

Intervention effects were tested with ANOVAs, MANOVAs, and ANCOVAs.