英文摘要 |
Purpose: Individuals require sufficient social skills to demonstrate appropriate social behavior in order to gain acceptance from others and to adapt to their environments. Everyone has the need to learn social skills and be accepted by others in groups. In school settings, peers inherently constitute long-term interaction companions for students. The current study investigated the effectiveness of the Social Skills Improvement System (SSIS) with peer-mediated intervention in improving young pupils' social skills. Methods: A single-case concurrent multiple-baseline-acrossparticipants design was used to examine the effectiveness of SSIS with peer-mediated intervention in improving the social skills of four elementary school students who required social skills training. First, the researcher taught the peers how to initiate conversation with target students by modeling appropriate social skills and providing feedback and prompts. Peers who mastered these tasks participated in the SSIS sessions with the target students. This study applied 10 SSIS units to 10 target social behaviors. During the intervention, the researcher instructed and modeled correct social skills. The paired peers practiced social skills with the target students in simulated events, the researcher provided prompts or praise and corrected the target students' behavior to enhance their performance. Results/Findings: The results demonstrated a functional relationship between the SSIS with peer-mediated intervention and social skills performance. The intervention had a significant effect in that it could improve the target students' social skills performance and maintenance effect. The teachers' questionnaire responses indicated that this research had high social validity, the SSIS was effective, and learning social skills was important to young pupils. Conclusions/Implications: The SSIS with peer-mediated intervention could stimulate target students to demonstrate appropriate social behavior. Concurrently, peers' social skills performance changed when they participated in the intervention. However, when the target students and paired peers returned to the classroom during the maintenance phase, they did not demonstrate the learned social skills or interact with one another. The reason for this is that the peermediated intervention could not be maintained in the class; hence, the target students had little motivation to demonstrate appropriate social behavior. Accordingly, implementing the SSIS in a natural classroom setting for the whole class is recommended. Teaching social skills through real events that occur in the classroom contributes to social skills maintenance. |