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Record W4408508032 · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0319398

A protocol of a randomized control trial to test the feasibility and efficacy of the EMPOWER social-emotional learning curriculum for youth aged 11–14 years in after-school settings

2025· article· en· W4408508032 on OpenAlexaffabout
Alice-Simone Balter, Madison Moloney, Clement Ma, Alina Lee, Sandra Pierre, Sheldon Parkes, Doga Pulat, Nicole Racine

Bibliographic record

VenuePLoS ONE · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicChild and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development
Canadian institutionsUniversity of OttawaPublic Health OntarioUniversity of TorontoCentre for Addiction and Mental Health
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCurriculumMental healthCoachingRandomized controlled trialSocial skillsPsychologyMedical educationIntervention (counseling)Positive Youth DevelopmentApplied psychologyMedicineDevelopmental psychologyPsychiatryPedagogy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

INTRODUCTION: Promoting youth mental health and well-being is a global concern. Administering social-emotional learning programs in contexts that are familiar to youth have the potential to increase mental well-being by helping youth develop fundamental coping skills that may contribute to their resilience. Implementing social-emotional learning programs in after-school settings is a unique opportunity to improve mental well-being skills in communities that face inequities. METHODS: The study is a partnership between investigators at an academic mental health hospital and an after-school program embedded within economically and socially vulnerable neighborhoods in a large metropolitan city in Ontario, Canada. This 20-week covariate-constrained randomized controlled trial will test the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of the EMPOWER social-emotional learning curriculum for youth aged 11-14 years in an after-school program. Twenty sites will be randomized to an intervention group or no-intervention control. Program staff in the intervention arm will receive training on the manualized curriculum and weekly coaching sessions to build capacity and support implementation over the 16-week program. Program staff and youth across both intervention and no-intervention control groups will be asked to participate in baseline and post-intervention data collection where they may complete questionnaires about youth's social-emotional learning skills, global quality of functioning, and resilience skills. The no-intervention control group will carry on with their regular programming while the intervention group implements the 16-week social-emotional learning curriculum, after the collection of baseline data. Program staff in the intervention group will be asked to complete weekly fidelity measures and monthly feasibility, acceptability, and appropriateness of implementation scales. Parents/caregivers of youth in the intervention group will be asked to participate in a brief interview to report their observations of their children's social-emotional learning skills. DISSEMINATION: Results from this pilot study will be disseminated in a peer-reviewed journal and at community and academic conferences.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.047
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.039
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Randomized trial · Consensus signal: Randomized trial
GenreCandidate signal: Protocol · Consensus signal: Protocol
Teacher disagreement score0.063
Threshold uncertainty score0.249

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0470.039
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0060.003
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0090.004
Bibliometrics0.0030.003
Science and technology studies0.0050.004
Scholarly communication0.0040.003
Open science0.0040.002
Research integrity0.0090.011
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0630.010

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.029
GPT teacher head0.306
Teacher spread0.277 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designRandomized trial
Domainnot available
GenreProtocol

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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