Designing and Evaluating the Effectiveness of Mindfulness-based Social Skills Training Package On the Components of these Skills in Slow Learner Students

Abstract

The main purpose of this study was to design a mindfulness-based social skills training package for slow learner students and to evaluate its effectiveness on the components of social skills in them. The method of this research was quantitative and quasi-experimental with pre-test-post-test design with control group. The statistical population was all male students in the fifth and sixth grades of elementary school in Tehran in the academic year 2020-2021 from which 30 people were selected by convenience sampling and randomly assigned in experimental and control group; Fifteen students in each group. This social skills training package based on mindfulness with social skills components in other training programs, mindfulness techniques and the opinion of a group of educational psychologists and teachers of slow learner students and related research backgrounds were designed and developed. This package comes in the form of 8 skills: listening, following the law, paying attention to homework, asking for help, taking turns in conversation, taking responsibility, anger management, and making friends during 10 sessions with the people in the experimental group. Trained online (due to Corona quarantine conditions). The control group did not receive this training at this time. The research instrument of the Parents Form was the Gresham and Elliott (1990) Social Skills Rating Scales. All social skills dependent variable data with four components of participation, assertiveness, responsibility, and self-control were analyzed using SPSS 26 software. In data processing, U-Mann-Whitney test and independent t-test were used, because of results of the assumption of Analysis of covariance. Findings show significant differences in the components of participation (P = 0.001), assertiveness (P = 0.000), and responsibility (P = 0.000), and no significant differences in the self-control (P = 0.001). The findings of this study confirmed the overall effectiveness of the mindfulness-based social skills training package on the components of these skills in slow learner students. This training package can be used as an aid tool to improve the social skills of these students at home and at school so that they can appear in society as independent and efficient citizens.

Keywords

• mindfulness
• slow learner
• social skills