Social Skills Training

Social skills training was found to have no discernible effects on cognition and positive effects on social-emotional development and behavior for children with disabilities in early education settings.

Social skills training is not a specific curriculum, but rather a collection of practices that utilize a behavioral approach to teaching preschool children age-appropriate social skills and competencies, including communication, problem solving, decision making, self-management, and peer relations. Social skills training can occur in both regular and special education classrooms.

A variety of social skills training approaches and curricula are available. For example, teachers may use a structured approach to explain to students how to enact a desired behavior by providing examples and reinforcing targeted behaviors through questions, answers, and other feedback. An example of a more nuanced approach (often referred to as “incidental teaching”) is when teachers respond to student-generated utterances, interactions, and behavior to encourage the desired social skills (such as rewarding positive play).

Three studies of social skills training that fall within the scope of the Early Childhood Education Interventions for Children with Disabilities review protocol meet What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards without reservations, and no studies meet WWC evidence standards with reservations. The three studies included 135 children with disabilities attending preschool in the United States, and the evidence used in this report focuses on data from 103 children.

Based on these three studies, the WWC considers the extent of evidence for social skills training on children with disabilities in early education settings to be small for two domains: cognition and social-emotional development and behavior. Five other domains are not covered in this intervention report.