A school-based intervention program as a context for promoting socioemotional development in children

The present study investigated the role of a school-based intervention program, called the Integrated School Day, in the socioemotional development of Finnish children during their first years of school. The 3-year program involved the restructuring of the school day by adding in extracurricular activities, which were organized on school premises, included a multitude of activities according to children’s wishes, and were available to every child. The longitudinal findings, based on the hierarchical linear modeling, showed that the 9- to 10-year-old children who had participated in the program (N = 276) had lower levels of internalizing problem behaviors, both social anxiety and depressive symptoms, than the non-intervention comparison group (N = 239). The difference was statistically significant in both genders. The results also showed that the higher number of years of participation (but not the number of different activities or the regularity of participation) was related to lower internalizing problem behaviors, particularly to lower social anxiety, at the end of the program.