Training of social competence with nursery-school children

Our study reports about the performance of a training with social inassertive nursery-school children (see Petermann & Petermann 1989). The proceeding was mainly related to the conception of learned helplessness of Seligman referred to an individual and a group training with exactly defined objects. The participants of the study were five children in the age between four and six years. Effects of the training could be proved by individual case studies and the application of ARIMA-models. Behavior observations were conducted to establish the diagnoses and to control the progress during the training. The training took place over a period of four months and the control of efficiency was extended to six months. The result was a confirmation of the differentiated hypotheses related to the individual cases and so a proof of the success of the training.