Abstract(s)
Behavior analysts typically conceptualize social skills as behaviors, or series of
behaviors, that mediate the responses of others. As such, practitioners may assess and
teach social skills using the principles of learning derived from operant conditioning
(e.g., positive reinforcement). In the current chapter, we first discuss the
conceptualization of social skills from a behavior analytic standpoint. That is, social skills
are behaviors that are evoked by environmental stimuli and reinforced by others. Next,
we describe behavioral assessments that may be useful to conduct prior to teaching social
skills to children such as task analysis, preference assessment, and functional assessment.
Finally, we review teaching strategies that may be adopted by practitioners to teach the
social skills identified by assessments. These strategies include prompting, fading,
chaining, shaping, and discrete trial training. We also discuss how to adapt reinforcement
schedules to teach social skills and present multiple methods to promote the
generalization of the newly learned skills.