Institution: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Program: Competence Support Program

Principal Investigators: Thomas Farmer, Mark Fraser

Key Staff: Steve Day

Program Description and Site-Specific Research:

The Competence Support Program is a multi-level program that includes social skills training, school-wide behavior management, and school-wide training in classroom social dynamics management. The researchers are evaluating the effects of this program in ethnically diverse, impoverished, rural schools – schools that are often neglected in intervention research.

In their complementary study, the researchers are examining how students' personal characteristics (such as risk status), social roles (such as bully or victim), and peer affiliations (either prosocial or antisocial) interact with the broader classroom and school social context. They are testing the ways in which the Competence Support Program trains teachers to identify student peer groups, the leaders of those groups, and the socially aggressive students in the classroom. It is hypothesized that along with direct instruction of students on making choices about how to behave in social situations, teacher training will in turn influence students' aggressive behavior and relationships with their peers in the classroom, school engagement, academic achievement, and bonding with school adults.

For more information on this project, please contact:

Steve Day

School of Social Work

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

301 Pittsboro Street, CB 3550

Chapel Hill, NC  27599

Phone:   919-962-6433

Fax:     919-962-7557

E-mail:            shday@email.unc.edu