Designing an analytical framework for canine-assisted interventions in school contexts

This poster presents findings from a research project which aimed to pilot a framework for teachers to use when evaluating interactions between children, handlers and dogs in school settings. The use of canine-assisted interventions has been studied extensively in clinical contexts and the use of these approaches in educational settings has attracted growing attention (Lewis et al, 2022). Yet there remains a lack of robust evidence about why these approaches might work (eg López-Cepero, 2020). One survey of over 600 educators involving dogs in schools found that teachers tended to focus on benefits for children, with only occasional references to staff and dog well-being. The need for schools to follow guidelines to ensure the safety and welfare of dogs is gaining traction as interest in such approaches increases (Grové et al., 2021).Implementing effective interventions require the development of an analytical framework and corresponding assessment tools that can be used by teachers to evaluate their practice. This study derives from methods of previous Animal-Assisted Intervention research and proposes evaluations that address research gaps relating to discourse pragmatics, interlocutor profiling, and environmental assessment. Methodology: Following a review of relevant literature, school observations, and consultations with canine handlers and staff in two schools, an audiovisual recording system was devised to enable the encoding of behavior in canine-assisted child and canine handler dyadic interactions that are playful and therapeutic in nature. The framework consists of individual evaluations of the child, canine handler and canine. The analysis considered separate assessments of audio and visual modalities of collected data. The auditory data included human and canine oral productions. Human speech was evaluated for linguistic (e.g., semantic) and paralinguistic (e.g., prosodic) components, while canine sounds were subjectively rated and coded by experienced canine behaviour trainers. Videos were coded for behaviours of interest then rated using adaptations of the CARing Kids Ethogram (Lee et al., 2022).Main findings: The framework proved to offer a detailed insight into the nature of the interactions taking place between child, handler and dog, and allowed educational professionals opportunity to evaluate such interactions from these perspectives. The poster illustrates how relationships between children and dogs developed over time in terms (of communication and xxx)Principal conclusions and implications for the field: The framework allowed researchers to examine the detailed nature of interactions between children, dogs and handlers in classroom settings. Informed by empirical research, this approach may be of interest to teachers and other educational professionals wishing to evaluate the impact of canine-assisted interventions on both human and dog wellbeing