Adolescents experiencing social anxiety often engage in safety behaviors--covert avoidance strategies for managing distress (e.g., avoiding eye contact)--that factor into the development and maintenance of their concerns. Prior work supports the psychometric properties of the Subtle Avoidance Frequency Examination (SAFE), a self-report survey of…

Social competences are crucial parts of vocational education and training (VET) competences. As part of a development project preparing unskilled young people for VET, an action research project was conducted with the aim of developing a schema for assessing and grading social competences. The development included defining the social competences…

The availability of effective research-based interventions and practices within schools is a growing concern within the field of education. There remains a lack of interventions that have been fully evaluated for use within schools and by school personnel, particularly in the area of social skills interventions. Understanding the need for social…

Social skills training (SST) is an evidence-based intervention to help increase social competence for students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD), but there is limited research that addresses SST for students identified as experiencing EBD at alternative campuses. A mixed methods design was utilized to examine SST at an alternative…

The purpose of this study was to examine teachers' social and emotional knowledge of students and how it functioned within the wider context of their daily work lives. Five elementary school physical education teachers participated in six rounds of observations with formal and informal interviews over one school year. Data were analyzed through…

The "self" is a complex multidimensional construct deeply embedded and in many ways defined by our relations with the social world. Individuals with autism are impaired in both self-referential and other-referential social cognitive processing. Atypical neural representation of the self may be a key to understanding the nature of such impairments.…

Background: Traditional disability categories may reveal little of the functional characteristics and social competence of a child. Objective: To compare the social competence of typically developing children, children with established disabilities and undiagnosed children identified by a functional approach to be in need of special support.…

In this article, the authors clarify the role of the leadership team, providing a rationale for one integrated team to examine academic, social, and behavioral programming, with careful attention to including all key stakeholders. Next, the authors discuss the procedures for teaching all key stakeholders the comprehensive, integrated, three-tiered…

Autism is the fastest growing disability ever. With the growth comes a lot of questions as to the etiologies and treatment of this condition, often putting parents, schools, and traditional medical personnel at odds with what treatments have efficacy. As the popularity of alternative treatments increase, so does the need for research. …

Students participate in a "social community" of learners. For children with learning problems, mastering the skills needed to actively participate in this community can be a challenge. How can teachers find time to provide social skills instruction, given the pressures to teach academic subjects first and foremost? This article shows school…

Systematic and ongoing assessment of children's skills and progress is at the heart of developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood classrooms. Careful assessment enables teachers to know the children with whom they work. Effective early childhood practice focuses on the needs of the whole child, so child assessment must similarly focus…

Elementary school children with normal intelligence and autism (n = 20), mental retardation and no autism (n = 24), and typical development (n = 37) were observed for 15 minutes during recess at school. Ten behaviors were scored as present or absent using the Playground Observation Checklist. Children with autism were distinguished from children…

This article provides an overview of some of the recent developments in assessing social skills of children, as well as best practices in conducting assessment and linking assessment to effective intervention. Naturalistic behavioral observation and behavior rating scales are proposed as first-line choices for social skills assessment. (Contains…

Evaluated the effectiveness of a training group for health care workers (N=5) engaged in learning interpersonal skills. Two research confederates observed and recorded group process. While participants reported a positive experience to the trainer, a negative experience was reported among group members, suggesting the possibility of subject bias.…

To date, the assessment methodology in the area has moved in two directions: sociometric measures (peer nomination and peer rating scales), which have provided the major means of identifying the socially competent child; and direct observation, principally employed in the specification of socially competent behaviors. (Author/DLS)