2018 — School-based prevention pilot

Intervention

Eight weekly 45-minute classroom sessions using CBT-derived skill-building with an emotional component. Targets included emotion awareness, self-control/emotion regulation, positive self-concept, social/peer skills, problem solving, and communication.

Findings

Compared with the two control schools, the intervention school showed lower CU-trait scores at 3 and 9 months and lower CD-symptom scores at 9 months. Impulsivity, paternal involvement, and friend support also favored the prevention condition at the relevant post assessment.

Why it matters

This is an early Fanti intervention node with distal trait/symptom outcomes and longitudinal follow-up, not merely a laboratory surrogate.

Source provenance

Headline outcomes are verified through PubMed/publisher records. The one-school-versus-two-schools allocation detail is confirmed in the exact Springer article text available as an author-uploaded e-offprint.

Critical design boundary

Treatment was assigned at the school level with only three schools total—one intervention school and two control schools—while the main analysis treated children as the analytic units in repeated-measures ANOVA. The study therefore cannot be represented as a conventional N=304 individual RCT. School-specific effects and treatment effects are difficult to separate with one treated cluster.

Other limits

No active comparator; mechanisms were not directly measured; no immediate post-treatment assessment; independent replication of this exact program was not located in the current pass.