Kernels Brazil

Research has consistently demonstrated the importance of children's social-emotional skills for their later-life scucess.  Evidence from high-income countries suggests that school-based programming can help to develop these skills, yet many of these programs are complex, time-intensive, and expensive to implement, and their rigidity can limit teachers’ autonomy to select and adapt materials to the specific needs of their students.  Furthermore, little is known about how such programs might support child development in low- and middle-income countries like Brazil.

In 2016, researchers from the SEED Lab, the EASEL Lab, and the Fundação Faculdade de Medicina at the University of São Paulo (USP) came together to launch a series of studies testing the effects of new, evidence-based, scalable approaches to support young, urban children’s social-emotional skills called kernels.  The first study in this series examined the effects of the Brain Games, which are easy-to-implement activities that support children's executive function and self-regulation skills.  Each game takes about 5 to 10 minutes and can easily be integrated into the early childhood classroom context.  In 2018, our team completed a randomized control trial of the Brain Games within a sample of 440 children in 44 early childhood programs located in favelas of the western region of São Paulo.  This study was funded by the Grand Challenges Canada’s Saving Brains program.

The seocond study in this series is funded by the Harvard Lemann Brazil Research Fund and DRCLAS and is currently underway in the muncipality of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  This new study is exploring the implementation of the Brincadeiras para o Aprendizado SocioEmocional (BASE), a set of kernels or activities targeting a broader set of social-emotional learning skills relevant to Brazil's national curriculum (e.g., citizenship, friendship, feelings).  The study will include 33 schools across the municipality and will explore questions related to the use of BASE during ongoing hybrid learning amidst the COVID pandemic.

For More Information

To learn more about Brain Games, read this article published by HGSE's Usable Knowledge.  To learn more about how the kernels have been used in the United States, see this article published in EducationWeek.