Promoting Social Understanding in Middle Childhood: A Training Study

Abstract

The study aimed to translate, adapt and implement a social understanding training program on middle childhood children, addressing the research gap and developmental lag in social understanding among Pakistani children. The first phase of the study involved translation and adaptation of the training program using the planned adaptation approach while maintaining the semantic, pragmatic and syntactic equivalence of the text. The second phase involved implementation of the adapted training program in two main stream school settings. The sample comprised 72 children, aged between 9 and 11 years, who were randomly assigned to either the experimental or control group. The participants were pre-tested on measures of executive functioning, working memory and social understanding, followed by a two weeks intervention. Participants were tested on both practiced and transfer social understanding tasks. The training of the experimental group involved participation in mental state stories involving misunderstanding, sarcasm, faux pas, and double bluff, whereas the training of the control group involved stories describing physical events. A post-test was conducted immediately after the intervention, along with follow up assessments at 3 and 6 months. The findings revealed a significant improvement in social understanding skills in the experimental group compared to the control group, even after statistically controlling for baseline executive functioning and working memory. Results were significant for practiced social understanding measures, strange stories (F=88.438, p<.001) and the faux pas transfer task (F=36.160, p<.001). However, the results for eyes test transfer task were non-significant (F=0.308, p>.05). The study has important educational and clinical implications