A comparison of social skills among second grade children with varying levels of reading achievement

To operate effectively in the social world, a child must learn to recognize, interpret, and respond to social situations. A child's social skills may play an important role in a child's social and academic status. Unfortunately, for many learning disabled children, the social sphere is an area of dismal failure which may be due to poor social perception abilities. Clinical observations and experimental investigations of learning disabled students have suggested that these students experience more difficulty than their non-disabled peers in accurately recognizing and interpreting the meaning and significance of others social behavior.

The present study investigated a comparison of social skills among second grade children with varying levels of reading achievement. The study predicted that parents and teachers would perceive underachieving children as possessing less adequate social skills than average or overachieving children. The study further predicted that there would be differences between underachieving, average achieving, and overachieving children in their ability to decode pictures of facial affect. The dependent measures for social skills were subscales selected from the Personality Inventory for Children (PIC). The dependent measure for decoding facial affect was the Pictures of Facial Affect (PFA) test. The independent measures were the child's performance on the Reading Subtest of the California Achievement Test (CAT) and The Cognitive Skills Index (CSI) of the California Achievement Test.

An analysis of variance of total score on the PFA and the various subscales of the PIC was utilized to test the hypotheses. The study's findings indicated that there were significant differences between underachievers, average achievers, and overachievers as rated by teachers on PIC subscales. No significant differences were found between underachievers, average achievers, and overachievers in the parents' ratings of their childrens' social skills on PIC subscales. No significant differences were identified in ability to decode facial affect between the three achievement groups, contradicting the study's expectation and the reviewed literature.