Mental Health Training for Elementary Teachers Through Tele-education and Its Impact on the School Atmosphere

University of Sao Paulo

Status and phase: Completed; Early Phase 1

Conditions: Mental Disorders

Treatments: Behavioral: Text and Video-based education; Behavioral: Web-based interactive education

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT01860313

573974/2008-0

Details and patient eligibility

About

The purpose of this study is to create a web-based interactive educational environment to train elementary teachers, to identify children and adolescents in need of specialized mental health care and give them some advises in managing problematic children in class. After the creation of such an educational environment the psychoeducational project was tested in order to verify it's effectiveness.

Full description

Objectives: To develop and test the efficacy of a computer-based training to elementary school teachers of the most common mental health problems.

Outcomes: (a)early identification of the most common mental health problems among children and adolescents, (b)teacher's acquirement of manage skills to better deal with behavior problems and (c)teacher's acquisition of important knowledge to refer students to treatment when necessary.

Method: This research includes two steps: a pilot project (already implemented, whose data will be presented here) and a randomized clinical trial intervention (that will be implemented in a few months).

1. Pilot project, without control group - Comprehended six sessions of educational videos covering basic concepts of mental health stigma and the main disorders that affects children and adolescents followed by discussion forums, quizzes and a conclusion web conferencing with a specialist.
2. A randomized controlled trial with a sample of 176 teachers from nine elementary schools were randomly divided in three groups: a web-based interactive educational group (WBIE), a text and video-based educational group (TWBE) and a waiting list group (WL).

Outcome measures: knowledge, beliefs and attitudes of teachers in mental health and satisfaction with the training received.

Results: The results show that there was an increase in knowledge, attitude changes in mental health and reducing stigma among teachers of web-based interactive educational group. Indeed, comparing the three groups of study participants (WBIE, TVBE and WL), was verified that TVBE group compared with WL group did not show a significant statistical difference (B = 0.957, p = 0.127). Comparing WBIE with WL group, the WBIE answers correctly 1:44 (B = 1.44, p = 0.015). Regarding beliefs and attitudes, WBIE group increased significantly in the ability to identify children with mental health problems, search for mental health information, the ability to recognize colleagues with mental health problems. The average confidence in helping a student with mental health problems also showed increased after psychoeducational intervention in WBIE group.

Discussion: After adjusting educational tools, the methodology and with a bigger sample it's expected to have greater positive results. It's very important to offer teachers a basic apparatus so that they will be able to deal with mental health issues in schools.

Enrollment: 213 patients

Sex: All

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Primary Public Schools of Campos do Jordão City
• Internet Access

Exclusion criteria

• none

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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213 participants in 3 patient groups

Web-based interactive educational group

Experimental group

Description:

This group was submited to the web-based interactive education created for train teachers in child mental health, how to identify mental health problems in children and to know how to deal with problematic children in class.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Text and Video-based education

Behavioral: Web-based interactive education

Text and Video-based education

Experimental group

Description:

This group received the material that composed the web-based education environment without any kind of interactivity. This material was composed by some videos about children mental health and a support text.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Text and Video-based education

Behavioral: Web-based interactive education

Waiting List group

No Intervention group

Description:

This group was used as control group and did not receive any intervention.