Resilient: Improving youth well-being, motivation and academic achievement through social and emotional learning

Resilient will develop and test Robust, a learning program that supports students' social and emotional development in upper secondary school. The goal is to promote well-being, mental health, and motivation. International research shows that social and emotional skills are important for thriving in school, mastering schoolwork, and wellbeing. The Robust learning program will provide teachers with teacher training and material that will help them work systematically to support students' social and emotional development. Resilient will test Robust in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) with at least 80 ninth-grade teachers and their students, randomly divided into the intervention group and the control group. We will investigate intervention effects by measuring students' social and emotional competence, well-being, motivation, and school performance at the end of eighth grade (before the intervention), at the end of ninth grade (after the intervention), and in a one-year follow-up. In the intervention year, we will also conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the process and implementation to understand how the intervention is received and works. The new national school curriculum has a new interdisciplinary theme called «Public health and life skills». The research project Resilient is based on this part of the curriculum, and the teachers who are part of the project will receive competence and tools that they can bring into all subjects. The teaching materials and the digital teacher training: We have completed the teaching aids and the digital continuing education in Robust. The teaching material consists of a resource booklet for the teachers, in addition to a digital resource bank for both the teachers and the students. The digital resource bank contains support material, films, exercises, and assignments. It is supposed to support the students' development in five competence areas: Social relationships, attention training, problem-solving, emotions, and learning mindsets. The areas have been chosen because international research shows that these are important for social and emotional learning, and because they are central themes for life mastery as described in the national school curriculum for the lower secondary level. In the interdisciplinary theme of Public Health and Life Mastery students are supposed to be supported in strengthening the mastery of their own lives, coping with success and adversity in a good way, and through this strengthening their mental health. The digital teacher training gives the teachers an introduction to the research literature, which is the foundation for the teaching material in Robust. In addition, they get a thorough review of the teaching materials and get to know the different activities and tasks that are made for the students. The intention with the competence development is to increase the teachers’ awareness and competence on how the school can facilitate the students’ social and emotional development. Randomized controlled trial: We have recruited 27 schools into the project. These schools had a total of 85 classes in the 9th grade in the school year 2021/22 with 2149 students. At each school, we randomly divided the classes in the 9th grade in the school year 2021/22 into a treatment and a comparison group. At the end of the spring of 2021, we collected consent from teachers, students, and the students' parents, where they choose to consent or not consent to participate in the research project. At the same time, we collected the first student survey and teacher survey. The teachers in the treatment group started the digital teacher education just before school started in the fall of 2021. While receiving the teacher education, these teachers worked systematically to support the pupils' social and emotional development through the Robust learning program during the 2021/22 school year. At the end of the school year 2021/22, we collected the second round of student and teacher surveys. At the end of the school year 2022/23, we collected the third and final student survey. We have also gathered data on grades from school records and registry data from Statistics Norway (SSB) on family background. We have recently completed extensive work preparing the data to start the analyses that will examine the effects of "Robust" on students and teachers. We have used the most recognized methods for handling missing and incomplete responses in the surveys. The extensive dataset has already been utilized for numerous scientific publications investigating the relationships between various social and emotional competencies, how these competencies are linked to the learning environment, student mastery and wellbeing, and academic learning, and how teachers influence social and emotional learning.

Quality education is one that fosters the social and emotional development, as well as the academic development of each child. Social and emotional competencies are important, as they are closely linked to an individual's well-being and critical for motivation in school, academic success and labor market participation (OECD 2015). The current middle school curriculum and teacher practice in Norway do not reflect the international research literature stressing social and emotional learning as a key component of quality education (NOU 2014:7). An extensive national revision of the learning plan is currently addressing this concern. Our project Resilient is designed to meet the demands of the new learning plan. Resilient will empirically investigate if middle schools can improve youths' social and emotional competencies, and thereby enhance students' well-being, motivation and school achievement. We will conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) with at least 100 ninth-grade classrooms (n=2500 students), in which ninth-graders (14 years old) in treated classrooms participate in a social and emotional learning intervention called Resilient. Resilient is co-produced and piloted with users, and consists of a scientifically based curriculum, a web-portal with teacher and student resources, and an accompanying 10-credit teacher education. Based on international empirical research on how to enhance youths' social and emotional competencies, Resilient fosters competencies in social relationships, emotional regulation, problem solving, and motivational enhancement. We measure intervention-effects by assessing students' social and emotional competencies, well-being, motivation and school achievement at pre-intervention, at the end of the one-year intervention, and in a one-year follow-up. During the year of implementation, we conduct an extensive implementation and process evaluation, in order to understand why or why not the intervention is effective.