Effects of a Social Skill Instruction Program on the Social Skill Acquisition of African American High School Students with Mild Intellectual Disabilities and Challenging Behaviors

1 online resource (172 pages) : PDF

2011

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Disproportionality and the poor post-school outcomes for African American youth with disabilities have been ongoing issues in special education. Limited opportunities to engage in social interactions may exacerbate these poor post-school outcomes for African American students with mild intellectual disabilities and challenging behaviors. African American students per population consistently receive more office referrals, out-of-school suspensions, and expulsions than other students. Effective interventions that can offset social skill deficits or aggressive behaviors of African American students are important. One way to increase the social competence of African American youth with aggression who frequently display social skill deficits may be social skill instruction with anger management. By increasing students' social competence it may facilitate students' success within the school environment and enhance their post-school outcomes. A difficulty researchers have experienced is in getting social behaviors taught to generalize to more than one place and maintain over time. A way to facilitate the generalization of social skills may be to employ multiple exemplar training (i.e., training across different settings, varied role-play scenarios, training by different people). Research supports the idea that parent collaboration may help facilitate students' learning of social skills and increase the likelihood of generalization of these skills from the instructional small group to the classroom setting. Furthermore, when parents are informed that social skills are being taught at schools, they are more likely to prompt their child to practice these skills and reinforce skill demonstration in the home environment. Culturally relevant social skill instruction is rare in the literature, despite the inherent need for this type of instruction for African American learners. A culturally responsive, social skill instruction program can serve as a way to promote the overall social competence of this population of students. This study examined the effects of a small group, culturally responsive social skill instruction program, incorporating parental involvement, on increasing the prosocial behaviors of three African American high school students with mild intellectual disabilities and challenging behaviors. In addition, the function of participants' social behavior was examined and incorporated into instruction.

doctoral dissertations

Special education

Ph.D.

African American
Aggression
Culturally Relevant
Intellectual Disabilities
Parent Collaboration
Social Skill Instruction

Special Education

Lo, Ya-yu

Sherry, Lee
O'Brien, Chris
Levy, Janet

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2011.

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