Components Study of Relationship Education and Leadership Essentials Data, United States, 2022-2023

In September 2020, the Office of Population Affairs (OPA) funded an exploratory implementation and outcome study to understand the components of REAL Essentials Advance (REA), a popular relationship education program intended for youth in high school. The REA study occurred over two school years (2021-22 and 2022-23) and involved 27 schools with a total of 1,301 youth participating in cohorts during spring and fall 2022. Each school implemented a different collection of lessons (a scope and sequence) from the REA program, and a total of 40 different scope and sequences were observed in the study. The expectation was that variation in student experiences of lessons across these scopes and sequences would produce variation in levels of outcome improvement (e.g., a school that primarily offered lessons that focused on emotional regulation would tend to show larger improvement in emotional regulation outcomes than a school that did not offer these lessons).