Social Skills Training for Secondary Students With Emotional and/or Behavioral Disorders

Secondary students with or at risk for emotional and/or behavioral disorders (EBD) can be characterized as having severe deficits in social competence. Moreover, as students transition into the secondary grades, social competence takes on increased complexity and importance. Social skills training (SST) represents a class of interventions routinely implemented with secondary-age students identified as EBD as a means of improving their social competence. What is unknown, however, is whether the evidence base supports the use of SST for this particular subset of students. The purpose of this research was to synthesize the meta-analytic literature evaluating the efficacy of SST for secondary students with EBD. Results from this analysis indicate that SST produces improvements in two thirds of secondary students with EBD, compared to only one third of controls. The results from this analysis are interpreted in light of opposing opinions regarding the efficacy of SST for secondary students with EBD.