Self-Determination Measures Impacted by Social Skills Training Intervention in Students with Severe EBD and a Mental Health Diagnosis in a Self-Contained Setting

Abstract

Students with Emotional or Behavioral Disabilities (EBD) possess academic and social deficits when compared to their peers. Social skills instruction is used as instructional practice to remedy these deficits for students with EBD. This group of students has also been found to have lower levels of self-determined behavior when compared to same aged youth. They lack the ability to demonstrate self-determined behavior due to limited capacity, environment, and inadequate communication skills. Higher levels of self-determination lead to many positive outcomes; including social, academic, and overall higher quality of life. Given an explicit training of some of the characteristics that define self-determination during social skills class over a six-week time frame a group of 5 students with severe emotional or behavioral disabilities and a mental health diagnosis in a self-contained setting showed a majority increase in self-determined behavior. The method of research was pre-post experimental design using pretest/ post-test methodology to compare percent change for each student participant per each evaluator using AIR Self-Determination rating scale (student, parent, educator). Five students and their parents participated in this study. After measuring the percent change (positive or negative) of the 14 returned rating scales, 11 of the 14 showed a positive increase in self-determined behavior in the five students. Inconsistent with previous research, parents rated the students more highly than the self-assessments of students.