Abstract:

The purpose of the present study was to foster prosocial skills in 92 children of fifth and sixth grades of elementary school, allowing the prevention of violence displays in school centers. School violence has several causes and consists on those intended aggressive behaviors which occur within the education center or nearby, with the aim of provoking some type of damage. In addition, the school violence issue is considered a group phenomenon in which most of children are immersed playing an active role either as a victim, aggressor or spectator, and affected in social, physical, psychological or emotional aspects (Trianes Torres, 2000). Prosocial conduct opposes to school violence, displaying interpersonal behaviors which are centered on concern for the others (Weir & Duveen, 1981), in other words, they are positive social skills which allow the individual to sustain healthy and positive interpersonal relationships (Morales Rodriguez & Suarez Perez, 2011). Under this perspective, an applied investigation of quantitative nature with a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest and a control group design was conducted (Campbell & Stanley, 1973). In the first stage, a literature revision about school violence was done in order to select the instruments for the present study. Afterwards, a diagnose was obtained using the “School Violence Questionnaire for Elementary School” (CUVE 3-EP) by Alvarez-Garcia, Dobarro, Rodriguez, Nuñez and Alvarez (2013) and the “Prosocial Behavior Questionnaire” to professors by Weir and Duveen (1981), allowing to determine the prosocial behaviors which students attain according to the teachers’ perspective and the school violence display perceived by students. Based on the results obtained, an intervention was done focusing on two school violence factors which were reported above the theorized mean value: Classroom Disruption and Student to Student Verbal Violence. The next stage consisted on the selection and adapting of activities that fostered prosocial behavior and diminished the school violence levels, as proposed by Garaigordobil (2004). At the end of the intervention, a posttest was applied to know the effects of the program, and the results were processed by parametric statistic analyses with a t test for related samples using IBM SPSS Statistics 19.0 software. The results indicated there was a significant difference after implementing the program, with an observable decrease in the school violence display and an increase in the prosocial behaviors from the experiment group.

Keywords:

School violence, prosocial behavior, elementary school children, education for peace, applied investigation.