Figure 4.8. A model of social knowledge acquisition and social performance, based on Bye & Jussim (1993).
In addition to processing and acting on cognitive information, learners must also develop social and affective skills. Affective skills are discussed in Chapter 8; the present section will briefly discuss social skills. Social skills are valuable for many reasons. In the classroom, social skills enable students to get along together (thereby minimizing distracting discipline problems) and to communicate ideas (thereby facilitating cooperative learning and peer tutoring). Outside the classroom, Salzberg, Lignugaris, & McCuller (1988) have reported that inappropriate communication and lack of social skills were the most frequently cited reasons for failure of persons with mental retardation to obtain, perform, and maintain good jobs.
Figure 4.8 shows a model of social knowledge acquisition and social performance4. A brief description of that diagram will offer useful insights into how social skills are learned and applied.
Figure 4.8. A model of social knowledge acquisition and social performance, based on Bye & Jussim (1993).
Reading the diagram from left to right, we can see that this model describes the sources of social information available to us and what factors influence this information before we use it. The social information listed in the leftmost box is the input that feeds into the filters. Each filter influences the social information that will be passed on to the next box in the diagram. The first set of filters consists of environmental factors. These environmental factors filter social information in the sense that cultures, sanctions, and other environmental factors influence the information we are likely to get from the environment. Social information that comes through the first filter is then filtered by physiological factors. For example, a person with a short attention span would get different information from the environmental filter than a person from the same culture with a longer attention span.
After social information is filtered by the physiological factors, it is passed along to and influenced by the information processing filter. For example, different children are likely to encode social information with different degrees of efficiency. This information processing filter interacts with the social knowledge filter. This means that what a person already knows will both influence and be influenced by what he or she already knows about social activities. After we know what social behaviors are appropriate, the decision to actually engage in social behavior will be influenced by the motivation filter.
This discussion of social skill acquisition has been necessarily brief, but even this brief introduction can have practical value for classroom teachers. For example, if a child is having problems getting along with peers, the teacher can use this diagram to pinpoint the problem and to generate ideas to help the child overcome these problems. Without this model, for example, a teacher may assume that a child who disrupts other students should be punished. By using this model to guide remediation, however, the teacher would realize that punishment would have a chance of being effective only if the problem were that the child knew what to do but was refusing to do it. This model may suggest that for a given child, the problem may be in the second (physiological) filter; and this would lead to a different course of action than would be appropriate for a child for whom the breakdown was in the operation of the motivation filter. It would also be useful to develop data collection strategies to diagnose where breakdowns occur and to consider using specific programs designed to remediate various social information shortcomings, such as the Think Aloud program advocated by Camp & Bash (1981).
Learners develop social skills in much the same way that they develop the other skills discussed in this chapter. It should be obvious, for example, that the family has a strong influence on Filter 1 and that maturational factors play an important role in Filter 2. In fact, the skills needed to apply all the filters described in this diagram undergo development. That is, as children grow into adulthood, they develop skills that pertain to these various filters; and what happens to them during one period of development is likely to influence how they will react to subsequent social information.
There are several other models of social competence and social skills acquisition (e.g., Gumpel, 1994). Like the model diagrammed in Figure 4.8, these generally focus on the need for learners to interpret their social environment, to make decisions, and to implement a plan of action in order to elicit reinforcement and avoid punishment during their interactions with other people. Although these models emphasize the importance of the positive and negative consequences discussed in chapters 10 and 11 of this book, they also stress the role of motivation (chapter 5) and information processing (chapters 6 and 7) in the development of social competence.
While social skills are important in their own right, they also play an important part in school success (Feshbach & Feshbach, 1987; Wentzel, Weinberger, Ford, & Feldman, 1990). While strategies that help students develop academic behaviors do not automatically lead to a similar development of social skills, interventions to develop social skills do tend to help students develop their academic skills (Wentzel, 1993). This is because there are many situations in which students can gain academic benefits by being able to interact effectively with teachers and peers. A particularly important set of social skills - seeking, giving, and receiving help - is discussed in the following section of this chapter.
Click on a topic from the following list, or use your web browser to go where you want to go: