Social Skills Training of LD Adolescents: A Generalization Study

The purpose of this study was to determine the reliability of role playing as a device for assessing generalization of social skills training and to determine the extent to which LD adolescents generalize specific social skills to the natural setting following training. LD high-school students' social skills were observed in two types of situations before and after training: (a) contrived (but unobtrusive) situations in the subjects' natural environment, and (b) novel role-playing situations. Results suggested that LD adolescents do not automatically generalize recently learned social skills to novel role-playing situations and the natural environment. Also, high performance in a novel role-playing situation does not necessarily mean that a student will show a correspondingly high performance in the natural environment. Consequently, it appears that learning disabled adolescents must be trained to generalize newly learned social skills, and that generalization of newly learned social skills should be measured in the learner's natural environment.