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, whether adept in social skills, or subject to impulsive, defiant, or aggressive acts.

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 their peer interactions 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 multiple 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, the first and second grade lessons teach understanding and regulating emotions. In the third grade, the entire 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. 

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 of 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.