Skillstreaming in Early Childhood

The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss McGinnis and Goldstein's (1990) program Skillstreaming in early childhood: Teaching prosocial skills to the preschool and kindergarten child. In this regard, skillstreaming can be defined as a set of instructional methods and strategies designed to promote social behaviors. The skillstreaming program was developed by the authors based on the assumption that it is important for educators to provide students with instruction in problem-reducing and problem-avoiding prosocial and affective skills.

While skillstreaming programs are available for students of diverse ages, McGinnis and Goldstein (1990) state that beginning the program at the preschool and/or kindergarten level is especially important in that this early learning of prosocial behavioral alternatives enhances the child's personal development and helps prevent more serious difficulties in later childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood.

Skillstreaming programs are not only used with students of diverse ages, skillstreaming curriculum has also been developed and implemented for various types of student populations. At the preschool and kindergarten level---as well as other levels--these include curriculum for students with learning disabilities (McGinnis, 1985); students with behavior disorders (Miller, 1992); and physically handicapped students (McGinnis, 1985).

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sts developed for Skillstreaming the Elementary School Child (McGinnis & Goldstein, 1984). The experimental group (N = 120) received social skills instruction for a ten week period. This training consisted of ten structured lessons from the skillstreaming curriculum and included friendship-making skills, skills for dealing with feelings, skill alternatives to aggression, and skills for dealing with stress. Anger control training was also taught as a parallel affect-oriented effort in an attempt to teach students the causes of anger and anger reduction techniques. At the end of the ten week period of social skills instruction, both the experimental and control groups were administered the posttests. Data analysis revealed that overall there was a significant effect on the experimental group's coping behaviors; however, findings appeared to be somewhat test-specific. That is, coping skills (as measured by the Getting Along test and the Teacher Skill Checklist) were significantly higher in the experimental group than in the control group; however, the Test of Coping Style and the Student Skill Checklist did not reveal significant differences between the coping behaviors of the experimental group and the coping behaviors of t
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Approximate Word count = 1297
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)