What is Making Choices?
The Making Choices curriculum presents a series of cognitive problem-solving lessons intended to broaden children’s social knowledge and skills for successfully interacting with peers and adults. Designed as a school-based or small group intervention for students in kindergarten through fifth grades, Making Choices is appropriate for all children, including children who may be impulsive, defiant, or aggressive.
The Social-Cognitive Model
The activities in Making Choices focus on social, emotional, and cognitive competencies associated with building relationships and working collaboratively with peers. The lessons rest on a social cognition perspective that links childhood aggression to deficient information processing skills and social-emotional maladjustment. Researchers describe social information processing as the cognitive steps that allow us to interpret our interactions with others, from noticing and grasping cues to understanding the intent of other people’s behavior toward us. Children who rely on aggressive behavior to resolve disputes often experience situations differently. They discern more threats, generate few response options, and favor aggressive responses because they are readily available in their repertoire of social knowledge. Aggressive behavior declines for most children during elementary school. However, by the first and second grades, poor social-emotional skills and impaired friendships begin to distinguish children in a developmental trajectory of chronically high aggressive behavior from children in trajectories of low or declining aggressive behavior.
The Curriculum
Comprised of interactive lessons across kindergarten through fifth grade, each unit of Making Choices corresponds to one of seven steps in processing social information: (a) understanding and regulating emotions, (b) encoding social and environmental cues, (c) interpreting cues and intentions, (d) setting relational goals, (e) formulating alternative strategies, (f) selecting prosocial strategies, and (g) enacting a selected strategy. In addition, topics linked to key developmental tasks are presented at each grade level. For example, in kindergarten and first grade children learn to recognize and name feelings, and in the second grade, they learn to regulate emotions and responses to provocation. In the third grade, the problem-solving sequence is taught and in the fourth grade, it is integrated with emotion regulation. In the fifth grade, the curriculum focuses on social aggression and bullying.
Each grade level from kindergarten through fifth grade includes 12 to 15 sequenced lessons. Making Choices activities, ranging from recognizing emotions to implementing one’s choices, are gauged to be developmentally appropriate. The lessons include objectives, concepts and ideas related to lessons, which are comprised of learning activities. By practicing the Making Choices skills in a variety of activities children build their competency and generalize skills to different environments. The lessons are academically aligned; each lesson builds on objectives found in The North Carolina Standard Course of Study which is based on the National Standard Course of Study. Teachers are encouraged to adapt Making Choices activities to fit curricula in language arts and, more generally, to meet the needs of students in their classes.
Intended Outcomes
Although outside normal conscious awareness, the problem-solving steps and associated skills are thought to define, in part, whether a child will encounter new situations with positive expectations or a sense of distrust and defensiveness. They dispose children to interactional styles that affect opportunities for future social involvement and adjustment. The intended outcomes of the Making Choices curriculum are to increase social competence, increase contact with prosocial peers, decrease peer rejection, and disrupt the chain of risk linking early aggressive behavior to later maladjustment, including poor academic achievement.
Evaluation Findings
Research on third-grade children suggests that Making Choices is effective in promoting social competence and reducing both overt and social aggression. In a study of 548 third-graders, teachers rated the skills and behaviors of children over three years: year one without the program, year two with the Making Choices program, and the third year with the Making Choices Plus program. Making Choices had a positive impact on the children’s skills in encoding social cues, formulating goals, and interpreting the intent of others. Perhaps because of these new skills, teachers observed that children also increased their social competence and their network of friends, while reducing both physical and social aggression.
Resources
A clinical version of the curriculum has been published by the NASW Press (http://www.NASWPress.org).
The School of Social Work at UNC Chapel Hill maintains a Making Choices website with information about the program, how it works, and research findings: (http://ssw.unc.edu/jif/makingchoices/)
