Trial Schools Needed for 2009

We are serious about improving students' ability to cope with stress, anxiety and depression. We have developed two web based courses to fit within Stage 5 of the NSW PDHPE 7-10 Syllabus. Each course consists of six lessons and each lesson comprises an illustrated story line to be viewed online to educate, and prepared class exercises to consolidate that knowledge. Together they fit within the usual class period.

We have shown that the Stress course and Alcohol course for students in Stage 4 are effective and now wish to evaluate the Anxiety and Depression courses for students in Stage 5. Would your school be interested in joining with us in this evaluation?

The steps are:
1. We send you information about the evaluation trial
2. Your head of school completes a school consent form
3. We randomly allocate your school to either the anxiety lessons, the depression lessons or teaching as usual
4. We send you the relevant information pack ? in the case of the anxiety and depression courses this includes information about the content of the course and the mechanism whereby children can log on.
5. All schools get an information letters for parents that allow them to opt out from having their children's questionnaire data being forwarded to researchers. This means that no students will be excluded from completing the class work, and teachers aren't required to enforce the return of forms.
6. All schools will get students to complete a 50 item questionnaire (10-15 minutes) over the internet on three occasions; in the period before the lessons start, in the period after the lessons finish and six months later.

Participating schools will have free access to the complete suite of Climate schools courses after completion of the trial. The 24 schools that participate will be randomly allocated to either the Anxiety course, the Depression course or to be a control school that does not use Climate in their classes but whose students complete the assessment questionnaires (50 questions via the web) at similar times to the schools testing the two active courses.

If you are interested in your school trialing this worthwhile program, more information can be obtained by emailing contact@climateschools.tv.