What is PERGEL?

PERGEL(Positive Youth Development) is a project designed for enhancing positive development early adolescents. As the PERGEL Project team, our goal is to reach students during early puberty period and support their socio- emotional development. With our project, we examine adolescent development and our training program focuses on this area.

We say “The compass of your life is in your hands!” and we emphasize change. Even if one leg of the compass keeps firm, the other leg can spread out, indicating that a person can change himself or herself. That’s why we chose “Compass” as the title of our project.

Why early adolescence?

Early adolescence is a very significant development period in terms of human socialization. Socialization is the process when a child becomes the member of society and some necessary values skills, and behaviors for this socialization develop during early adolescence period. Leaving childhood behind, the young individual is in the process of stepping forward in terms of both cognitive capacity and socio-emotional development.

The key characteristics that determine to-be adults and citizens in the future are built in these ages on top of the foundations laid in childhood. Recent research shed light on these processes.

Despite this significance of early adolescence, it has not come into prominence in psychology and developmental research. In this sense, our research is a promising an eye-opening scientific initiative which would fulfill this gap and provide theoretical and practical contributions.

What have we done?

In our research, social and emotional development of 6th grade early adolescents was compared by in-depth observation and measurement Through a scientifically-based training program, positive development of these adolescents was supported. The impacts of this program were determined by one post-test and two follow-up sessions. The research had an experimental design with a theoretical and applied approach.