A comparison of two intervention strategies for improving the social status of learning disabled elementary school children

Abstract

Twelve socially rejected learning disabled children, aged 8-12 years, participated in a 6-week training programme involving either referential communication or interpersonal problem-solving. The effects of these interventions were compared with those of an attention control group using measures of interpersonal problem-solving, referential communication, social self-concept, and social status at pretreatment, post-treatment, and 2-month follow- up. It was predicted that children trained in referential communication or interpersonal problem-solving skills would show improvement specific to the trained task and that this would in turn lead to improvements in social status and social self-concept. The findings indicated that all groups showed improvement on both speaker and listener referential communication tasks but not on interpersonal problem-solving measures. This improvement, however, was not found to be positively correlated with improvements on the social status or social self-concept measures. It was concluded that the training programmes were no more effective than the attention control group for improving learning disabled children's performance on measures of referential communication, interpersonal problem-solving, social self-concept, and social status.