Experimental Design
The research team plans to conduct a questionnaire survey at 138 rural schools and then randomly assign the schools to three groups, each consisting of about 46 schools.
The first group is the "rural teachers" course group (42 schools). The project team will train rural teachers on social-emotional learning for two days every semester, provide SEL-relevant materials (including teacher’s guidelines, student textbook, instruction slides, and teaching props) to the course group, and require each rural teacher to give a class once a week and punch in after class. The rural teachers will teach the social-emotional learning course once a week in their own school, and give feedback in the online community.
The second group is the " rural teachers collective learning" course group (49 schools). The basis setting is the same with the first group. At the same time, 6-7 teachers from the same county form a learning group, and they select one teacher as the chief teacher, namely the group leader. The chief teacher regularly supervises other teachers in the group to attend classes and organize collective discussions, and the research team provides training opportunities for the chief teachers to encourage the chief teachers to lead and organize group learning and discussions on SEL courses.
The control group will not receive any treatment from the research team.
By cooperating with the provincial education department in Gansu Province, we are able to carry out the trial in three prefectures and cover 138 rural schools. In each school, one or two classes in Grade 4 are randomly drawn to make up the final sample. The research team provides intervention courses/materials to treatment schools for free and supports the daily project management.