The impact of the PROMEHS program on preschoolers’ social and emotional competencies: Evidence from direct measures

The effectiveness of the PROMEHS program – designed to enhance students’ social and emotional learning (SEL) – has thus far been evaluated in preschool settings only through indirect measures. In contrast, this study assessed the effectiveness of the SEL component of the PROMEHS program by using direct measures with preschool children. Participants were 139 preschoolers (mean age in months: 4 years and 10 months; 63 girls, 48.6%) assigned to either a training group (N = 71), who engaged in PROMEHS activities, or a control group (N = 68), who continued with regular educational activities. All children were individually administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test at the beginning of the study. In order to evaluate the PROMEHS effectiveness, the Test of Emotion Comprehension, and two false-belief tasks were administered both before and after the intervention phase. We analyzed the data using a general linear model statistical approach. A repeated-measures multivariate analysis of variance, controlling for age and gender, was run. It revealed that children in the training group improved significantly more than their peers in the control group in emotion understanding, both globally and in the subcomponents related to the external and mental levels of emotion understanding. Additionally, we observed marginally greater gains in the training group children’s theory of mind scores. We discuss the implications of these findings for implementing educational proposals that incorporate PROMEHS activities in preschool settings.