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Guide
to Effective Programs
for Children and Youth |
SOCIAL COMPETENCE PROGRAM
OVERVIEW
The Social Competence Program is a social skills training program delivered to elementary school children in small groups for one hour per week. The program intends to impact children’s externalizing behaviors, internalizing behaviors, learning problems, and peer acceptance. The program is specifically designed for children at high risk of acting out, shy/withdrawn behaviors, and/or learning problems. An experimental evaluation of the program found it to have positive impacts on internalizing behaviors, learning problems, and peer acceptance and mixed impacts on externalizing behaviors.
The Social Competence Program is delivered by undergraduate students who are trained in two-hour sessions to deliver the intervention. The program is delivered to small groups of elementary school children. The groups meet for one hour per week for fourteen weeks. The program teaches children skills to identify interpersonal problems, generate alternative solutions, and anticipate the consequences of their actions. The model posits that children can learn the skills to solve their problems. These skills are learned in several stages:
The first four weeks of the program focus on identifying interpersonal problems. This phase of the program includes feeling generation exercises, puppet scenarios, and role playing. Children learn to define a problem and develop a goal.
Weeks five through eight are focused on generating alternative solutions to interpersonal problems. This phase includes puppet scenarios, role play exercises, group discussions, and brief stories. Children are presented with a problem and asked to generate as many solutions as possible, without focusing on social appropriateness or likely success of the solutions.
In weeks 9 through 12, the focus of the program turns to anticipating the consequences of solutions. Children are asked to determine the best solutions to problems based on social appropriateness and likelihood of success. In this phase, group leaders write problems and possible solutions side-by-side on a chalk board.
The final two weeks of the program focus on integrating the components learned in previous sessions into a complete problem-solving process. In this phase, groups of children act out scenarios involving interpersonal problems, and the remaining children discuss the problem and decide on the best solution. The chosen solution is then acted out. The theme of this exercise is, “once you have a good solution, try it out.”
Mannarino, A. P., Christy, M., Durlak, J. A., Magnussen, M. G. (1982). Evaluation of social competence training in the schools. The Journal of School Psychology, 20, 1:11-19.
Approach: All children in first through third grade at a suburban elementary school were screened for participation in the study. Children who were deemed at risk due to their scores on a teacher assessment were randomly assigned to an experimental group or control group. The children in the experimental group participated in the Social Competence Program, and control children did not.
Children were rated by their teachers on two scales of acting out, shy/withdrawn behaviors, and learning problems once before the beginning of the program (pretest) and once more within a week of program termination (posttest). Changes in scores from pretest to posttest were used to assess program impacts. Additionally, all children in the first, second and third grade participated in pre-test and post-test peer ratings in which they named their favorite three children to play with after school, to do a group project with, and to go to another classroom with. Changes in peer rating scores were calculated for children in the experimental and control groups and used to examine program impacts on peer acceptance.
Results: At posttest, children in the experimental group had made greater improvements on almost every teacher-rated scale. Experimental group children improved more than control children on both measures of shy/withdrawn behaviors, both measures of learning problems, and one of the two measures of acting out problems. Although teachers were not blind to which children were in the treatment condition, findings were confirmed by classmates. Specifically, children in the experimental group made significantly higher gains in peer acceptance scores than children in the control group.
Mannarino, A. P., Christy, M., Durlak, J. A., Magnussen, M. G. (1982). Evaluation of social competence training in the schools. The Journal of School Psychology, 20, 1:11-19.
KEYWORDS: Children (3-11), Elementary, Males and Females (co-ed), High-Risk, Suburban, School-based, Skills Training, Other Behavioral Problems, Social Skills/Life Skills, Other Social/Emotional Health, Other Relationships, Other Education
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© Child Trends 2003 |