Describes microcounseling and interaction analysis, provides a reationale for the "marriage" of these two successful innovations, and demonstrates how the combination can provide an objective and systematic technology for the development of effective interpersonal communication skills.

The purposes of this paper are: (1) to identify uses of the term social competence for preschool and early school children, with origins directly in research, and (2) to formulate a definition of social competence reflecting consensus across three different research perspectives. From an ethnological perspective, social competence consists of…

The interaction tasks (or communication process) model, an experimental model to enable instructional managers (in this case education students undergoing microteaching) to demonstrate competence in their interactions with students, is predicated upon four sequential component subsystems: (1) selection, (2) planning, (3) criterion task, and (4)…