Interventions need to be put in place for kindergarten students with disruptive behaviour (DB) with a view to preventing school dropout and violence during adolescence. The Fluppy prevention program has been used in Québec kindergartens for 20 years. It targets children with high levels of DB and includes five intervention components implemented in the classroom and at home.
The Fluppy prevention program has been used in Québec kindergartens for 20 years.
Our team began to evaluate the efficacy of Fluppy in 2002. Students (N=320) with high levels of DB were randomly assigned to an experimental or a control group. The beneficial effects of Fluppy were then observed on the short term.
The real test of Fluppy’s efficacy required a new long-term assessment of the program’s participants (at age 17). A total of 253 families (80% of the initial sample) took part in this follow-up study.
The findings showed no difference in academic or psychosocial outcomes between the young people exposed to Fluppy in kindergarten and those in the control group at age 17. In other words, Fluppy had no impact on the long term. These findings could be explained by the low intensity of the version of Fluppy under evaluation (lower than that prescribed by the program’s developers and offered in similar US programs).
We recommend: 1) tightening the implementation of Fluppy and adhering more closely to the developer’s guidelines by increasing the program intensity and 2) continuing the development (content and targets) and evaluation of Fluppy.
Main researcher
François Poulin, Université du Québec à Montréal
Deposit of the research report: July 2017