Al's Pals

Al's Pals: Kids Making Healthy Choices is an early childhood curriculum designed to increase the protective factor of social and emotional competence in young children and to decrease the risk factor of early and persistent aggression or antisocial behavior. The program was piloted in Head Start and other community-based child development centers whose populations included primarily African-American and white children. Since the pilot, the program has been expanded and found to be effective with children ages 3 to 8 of all socioeconomic and racial backgrounds living in urban, suburban, and rural areas. Al's Pals has been proven to work in preschools, early elementary school grades, afterschool programs, and childcare centers.

The program follows from the premise that by intervening during the early years when children are forming patterns of behaviors and attitudes, reductions can be made in the likelihood of their later developing aggressive, antisocial, or violent behavior. Al's Pals is based heavily on resiliency research as a framework for developing an intervention. Its curriculum is designed to build resiliency by presenting children with real-life situations that introduce them to health-promoting concepts and prosocial skills. The program also recognizes the ongoing nature of resilience-building and trains teachers to use resilience-promoting concepts in their teaching and classroom management practices.

The goal of the Al's Pals program is to teach children how to practice positive ways to express feelings, relate to others, communicate, brainstorm ideas, solve problems, and differentiate between safe and unsafe substances and situations.

Studies have shown that the program resulted in higher degrees of positive change in the intervention groups, increases in prosocial behaviors and positive coping behaviors, and decreases in antisocial and negative coping behaviors.

Several studies of Al's Pals conducted in preschools, elementary schools, and childcare centers since the program was first piloted in 1993 show promising results. For the 1994-95 study, results of repeated measures analysis of variance (known as ANOVA) showed that intervention children had significantly greater improvements in behavior than control group children. A similar analysis used in the 1995-96 study showed that intervention children had significantly greater improvements in behavior than control group children, as well as higher postscores for positive coping and lower postscores for negative coping.

Data from the 1996-97 Michigan study was analyzed using independent t-tests, paired t-tests, and repeated measures of variance to assess differences between intervention and control groups, to examine within-group pre-post changes, and to compare the degree of change experienced by both groups. The results of the analysis showed statistically significant improvements in prosocial skills in the intervention group. There was no significant improvement in prosocial skills for control group participants. In terms of problem behavior, there was no change for the intervention group, while problem behavior for the control group increased. As in previous studies, this analysis revealed a higher degree of positive change for the intervention group than for the control group. Findings from additional one-group pre-post replication studies conducted in Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, and Virginia from 1997 to 2000 had similar results, including higher degrees of positive change in the intervention groups, increases in prosocial behaviors and positive coping behaviors, and decreases in antisocial and negative coping behaviors.

The 2004 study found the intervention group improved significantly on measures of social–emotional competence, prosocial skills, and some measures of coping, but there was no improvement in problem behaviors at the posttest.