The term “humane education,” as used in this study, refers to “education that includes human-, animal-, and environment-related issues to promote care and concern.” To date, research-based evidence supporting humane education's ability to promote kindness toward people is weak. Related research that has been done consists of relatively small studies in Western schools. The aim of the current study was to address “the paucity of evidence of the effectiveness of prosociality programs for a non-Western child population” and to determine if “including not only human- but also animal- and nature-related content and activities” can be effective in promoting prosociality in children.
The study investigated the effect of the Caring for Life (CFL) program on first and second grade students across eastern China over three separate years. The program ran for an entire academic year in each of the 25 participating schools. All grades and all classes in participating schools were involved in either an experimental group (implementing the CFL program) or a control group (not implementing the CFL program). Classes were randomly assigned to experimental or control group. A subset of students from each class (experimental and control) was randomly chosen to represent that class. Teachers used the Teacher Observation of Classroom Adaptation–Checklist (TOCA-C) Prosociality subscale to rate each of the students in the subsets at both the beginning and at the end of the academic year. The CFL program features student-centered activities promoting care for animals, people, and the environment. The program is designed to help students develop empathic self-efficacy, which is linked to prosociality among children. Program activities include cooperative learning experiences, simulation of animal actions, practicing adaptive empathic concern, reflecting on and celebrating prosocial behaviors, and establishing and maintaining cooperative social norms. The standard program consists of a sequence of 10 sessions implemented throughout an academic year. One of the 25 participating schools decided to implement an extended EFL program, giving students at this school twice the number of program-based activities. While the content of the program remained essentially the same at this school as the other schools, it was covered in more detail and included twice as much time engaging students in activities.
A primary analysis of the teachers' reports showed that students receiving the CFL program had larger pre-post gains in prosociality than students not receiving the program, controlling for student's initial level of prosociality. Results of an additional analysis showed that there were no appreciable differences in how the program was taught by teachers who had taught the program once before and teachers who had never taught it before. The additional analysis also showed that second graders who participated in the expanded program made significantly stronger growth in prosociality than second graders who participated in the standard program. Results also showed that program effect was especially strong among second graders and among those who began the study with relatively lower initial levels of prosociality.
These findings indicate that a school-based program that includes animal- and nature-related content and activities can increase lower elementary students' prosociality and that these benefits apply to children in non-Western cultures.
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