A field study of 29 mountain-course instructors at the Colorado Outward Bound School (COBS) explored the relationships of gender-related personality traits and soft skills to outdoor leadership styles and course outcomes. Soft skills are competencies necessary for effective interpersonal helping skills, as opposed to hard skills, which are…

Sex education for individuals with autism needs to be a part of planned instructional programs covering a variety of settings and foci, from health and hygiene to social skills and dating. The manner and amount of detail during the instruction will depend on the functioning level of the person being taught and what teaching strategies are most…

This manual describes the "Friends" project, a year-long effort in Minnesota to develop methods for the staff of residential service agencies to support people with developmental disabilities in establishing friendships with nondisabled people in their communities. Six agencies around the state selected a total of 23 individuals (ages 11…

To deal with behavior problems and create safe environments, schools increasingly have adopted social control practices. These include discipline and classroom management practices that analysts see as blaming the victim and modeling behavior that fosters, rather than counters, the development of negative values. To move beyond overreliance on…

This qualitative study asked three elementary principals what they did to learn about their school's culture, what informative sources were available, and what hindered their progress. The two principals having a successful year were aware of and responded to school culture; employed various strategies for gathering information from numerous…

The process of making one's own mask and having one's mask made was offered as an experiential exercise for a group of Outward Bound students training to be Outward Bound instructors. The integration of expressive arts with outdoor experiential education was an attempt to encourage balance between the technical and interpersonal skill development…

This practicum attempted to promote teacher and student sensitivity to seven mainstreamed, oral, elementary school children with hearing impairments. It also aimed to promote more social interaction between students with impaired hearing and those with normal hearing and to effect a more comfortable transition from a special school to the…

This document notes that community-based organizations such as the Cooperative Extension Service have joined the efforts to reduce juvenile delinquency through juvenile diversion programs. It then describes the "Dare to be You" program that was developed by the Colorado Cooperative Extension System. The six objectives of the program delineated in…

This study explored preschoolers' social cognition about their affect and behavior in difficult peer situations. Children completed the Challenging Situations Task (CST), a pictorial forced-choice measure developed to examine preschoolers' affective and behavioral responses to three problematic peer situations. Children also completed a task…

Love is an issue raised with some frequency by counseling clients. Research investigating the nature of love may be useful in providing a framework that counselors can use to conceptualize the signs and symptoms of clients who present with relationship issues when seeking help. This study was conducted to examine the nature of love as measured by…

This annotated listing of program offerings for the out-of-school adult with learning disabilities is intended as a national reference guide. The 26 programs listed represent those available for learning-disabled adults who may never attend or do not succeed in traditional college programming. The programs focus primarily on basic education,…

This paper proposes a definition of social skills in order to operationalize the components that need to be considered when teaching social skills to individuals with mental retardation in employment settings. It also presents current approaches to teaching social skills in employment settings. Social skills are defined as goal-oriented,…

The emergence of the information society introduces the academic community to the most significant revolution since the invention of the printing press. The growing use of computers can lead to a depreciation of self-worth. Since the machine can handle complex logical applications with considerably more speed and accuracy than most people, many…

Earlier research investigating the relationship between physical attractiveness and assertiveness found that physically attractive females were more assertive than other females. To investigate this relationship further and to broaden the scope of the study, 69 students were videotaped in groups of five to ten while responding to open-ended…

Constituting a secondary preventive intervention, 61 low SES preschool children attending four inner-city day care centers were provided a program of social skills building exercises. In contrast to primary preventive efforts that focus on a central concern, secondary prevention attends to potentially serious concomitant issues. In this study the…