Social Skills Training for Youth With Emotional and Behavioral Disorders and Learning Disabilities: Problems, Conclusions, and Suggestions

Teaching social skills to students with emotional and behavioral disorders and learning disabilities has become an accepted practice. Social skills training (SST), however, has often resulted in only modest and sometimes no changes in students' social competence. One of the main reasons is that acknowledged problems have been largely ignored. The purpose of this article is to examine those problems both conceptually and critically and to suggest that research begin to focus on replacement behavior training as a possible way to increase the effectiveness of SST.