Recent research has demonstrated that social skills training can be successful in bringing about enduring gains in unpopular children's sociometric status among peers. Further progress in promoting social competence in peer relations will depend upon the development of a framework for conceptualizing the process components underlying social…

Children's communication performance improves with age, which could result from increases in children's vocabularies, changes in their strategies of selecting messages from their vocabularies, or both. Three experiments were conducted to evaluate these explanations. Two types of communication tasks were employed. These data suggest younger…

Two training experiments were conducted to assess whether teaching grade 3 and 4 children to engage in comparison activity improves their referential communication performance (identifying a particular referent for a listerner) and message appraisal and production. Results demonstrated that comparison training improved childrens' referential…

Results from a survey of 62 students (ages 8-13) with mild mental retardation and 62 students without retardation indicated that high percentages of both groups understood what loneliness means; a loneliness questionnaire yielded satisfactory internal reliability; and boys but not girls with mental retardation reported more loneliness than did…

In a consideration of the development of referential communication performance, this paper describes three broad capacities that appear to underlie successful performance: the speaker's ability to analyze the persepective of the listener and formulate a message with this perspective in mind, the child's ability to meet the information processing…

This compilation of information for teachers and parents translates important aspects of research regarding children's social development and peer relationships into strategies that can be used by parents and teachers to understand and help children who need to develop more effective ways to deal with peers. The publication includes three topical…

A series of studies was conducted to investigate the nature of children's goals and the role of goals in children's competence in peer relations. First, a conceptual framework was devised which consisted of eight goal types reflecting social-interpersonal and task-related achievement aspects of game playing: task mastery, approach-oriented…

To assess the effects of age differences, type of task, intelligence (IQ), and reading achievement on referential communication performance, third and fifth grade children were asked to communicate messages for three types of tasks: word pairs, picture descriptions, and school-locations directions. The latter was specifically designed to assess…