Rating Scales for Assessing Social Skills
| · Social Skills Improvement System (SSIS) Rating Scales, Gresham and Elliott (2008)
This classic social skills rating system intended for students from ages 3 to 18 measures social skills, competing problem behaviors, and academic skills across four subscales, including an “Autism Spectrum” subscale. Companion intervention guides are available from the publisher. · Social Responsiveness Scale™, 2nd ed. (SRS™-2), Constantino (2012) The SRS-2 is designed to assess the severity of social impairment in children and adults (ages 2.5 years to adult) with autism through the use of parent or teacher rating scales (or both). The rating scales provide a total score, plus five subscale scores and two subscales compatible with the DSM-5. A bachelor’s or master’s degree in special education, education, psychology, school counseling, or related fields is required. · Matson Evaluation of Social Skills with Youngsters (MESSY), Matson, Rotatori, and Helsel (1983) Parents or teachers complete the MESSY (or the MESSY-II), which consists of Likert-style items. Resulting scores are reported in three subscales. · Behavioral Characteristics Progression (BCP), VORT Corporation (1997) This is one of the most comprehensive programs available, a distinction that also makes it a bit unwieldy. The BCP includes 2,300 behaviors arranged in 56 strands. Social–emotional skills are addressed throughout the BCP. A companion instructional activities guide is available from the publisher. |
We should also reiterate that functional behavioral assessments (explained in Chapter 3 ) should result in hypotheses that indicate social skill deficits that may become targets for instruction.
Discrepancies between social demands of target environments and a student’s level of proficiency in those skills becomes the basis for determining the social skills curriculum for that child. Target skills need to be directly taught via prompting and reinforcement in all pertinent environments. We discuss methods for teaching social skills in the remainder of this chapter