Affecting children's ability to understand other's feelings through an online cyber-wellness programme

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of using an interactive cyberwellness programme to teach primary school students life skills on cyberwellness as well as values like positive self perception and knowing the feelings of others. 95 male and 112 female Primary 4 Singaporean students participated in this research. Measures of self-perception and understanding of other's feelings were conducted for both control and experimental groups as a pre-test and post-test measure. The experimental group (N=46) interacted with the iZ HERO RESPECT programme, an online cyberwellness teaching programe, daily for 14 days, while the control group (N=107) did not experience the intervention. Questions measuring self perception and ability to know the feelings of others were taken from (Rosenberg, 1965)'s Self Esteem Scale, (Choo et al., 2010)'s psychological variables and (Liau, Tan, Li, & Khoo, 2012)'s Personal Strengths Inventory. Results showed significant increases in ability to know the feelings of others in the experimental group compared to the control group. There was no significant change to measures of self-perception in both groups. A knowledge quiz showed improvements in knowledge gained on cyberwellness for the female students in the experimental group but not for the male students. Overall, the iZ HERO RESPECT programme is demonstrated to be able to teach students to understand other's feelings, lending support for the use of technology to teach values. An area of application is that schools can free up curriculum time by allowing students to engage in such programmes at their own time outside of school. Further work will help analyze the elements of the programme that have helped or not helped in the participants' learning. Copyright © 2016 Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education.