# Classroom-Based Prevention in 1st Grade: Improving Self-Regulation, Reducing Aggressive Behavior, and Exploring Sleep and Screen-Time Influences

> **NIH NIH P20** · UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA AT COLUMBIA · 2021 · $204,160

## Abstract

Consistent with the Research Center on Child Well-Being’s overarching theme, the project addresses 
prevention of mental-emotional-behavior problems including promotion of self-regulation, and begins to 
integrate health-related variables into the conceptual and measurement plan. This project builds on research 
from a first-grade classroom strategy, the PAX Good Behavior Game, that has already shown some promise in 
reducing or preventing social maladjustment and aggressive-disruptive behavior. The intervention focuses on 
promotion of classroom-wide prosocial interactions and cooperation by all children throughout the school day’s 
tasks and activities. The two major project goals are: (1) a controlled examination of whether the first-grade 
intervention improves child self-regulation while replicating preventive impact on aggressive-disruptive 
behavior; and (2) exploration of whether other health-related functioning might moderate intervention 
outcomes. Although the importance of self-regulation for behavioral development and health is clear, the extent 
to which the intervention positively impacts self-regulation has not been fully established. The main study 
design for the first goal involves randomization of schools to either first-grade classroom intervention or control 
(programming as usual). The second goal will be pursued with a subsample of children to explore whether 
better/worse sleep duration might moderate intervention effects on outcomes, and similarly whether 
higher/lower screen time, an index of sedentary behavior in young children, might moderate intervention 
effects on self-regulation and the other outcomes. As an additional project objective, teacher self-efficacy and 
potential burnout will be explored as a factor that might be related to quality of implementation for the 
classroom intervention. This project is intended to guide the development of a larger and more comprehensive 
prevention trial. The research team will consider: (a) whether and how the health-related variables should be 
embeded in the research design (including the possibility of adding an arm that targets healthy lifestyle 
behaviors as outcome variables); (b) how self-regulation can be bolstered further; and, (c) how to carefully 
attend to implementation science issues given what is learned about teacher-implementers.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10128261
- **Project number:** 5P20GM130420-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA AT COLUMBIA
- **Principal Investigator:** Stacy-Ann A. January
- **Activity code:** P20 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $204,160
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** — → —

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10128261

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10128261, Classroom-Based Prevention in 1st Grade: Improving Self-Regulation, Reducing Aggressive Behavior, and Exploring Sleep and Screen-Time Influences (5P20GM130420-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10128261. Licensed CC0.

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