Project Konni

Learning and Developing Social Skills

In the course of their development children need to learn how to get along with others, how to calm down and to solve conflicts adequately. These (social) skills enable help in achieving academic success and they are negatively related to aggressive behavior. Project Konni concentrated on the question how children in elementary schools acquire social skills.

Within the context of prevention programmes in schools, we expected that certain learning strategies are used to acquire social competencies. In order to support this assumption empirically, we conducted three studies with children in elementary school age. In our first study, we developed a questionnaire to assess the children’s learning strategies. In addition to the questionnaire, interviews with children have been conducted in which they were asked about their approach to acquire social skills. In a third study we also observed children during a learning situation. As a result from our first study we know that children can be motivated in two ways to acquire socials skills (through their own wish or the wish of another person). Furthermore, we found that different strategies are applied when social competencies are learned (such as imitation, interaction, cognitive strategies).