The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) identified three studies of
social skills training that both fall within the scope of the Early Childhood Education Interventions for Children with Disabilities topic area
and meet WWC evidence standards. All three of these studies meet standards without reservations and together, they
included 135 children with disabilities in early education settings in the United States. Although this report presents
information about all three studies and their findings, the WWC’s summary ratings of the evidence of effectiveness of
the intervention are based on only two of the studies, that, together, included 103 children in their samples. The third
study, which had a sample of 32 children, did not provide sufficient information to support calculation of effect sizes
and statistical significance, which are used in determining the WWC’s overall evidence ratings.
The WWC considers the extent of evidence for social skills training on children with disabilities in early education
settings to be small for two outcome domains—(a) cognition and (b) social-emotional development and behavior.
There were no studies that meet standards in the five other domains, so we do not report on the effectiveness of
social skills training for those domains in this intervention report. (See the Effectiveness Summary on p. 5 for further
description of all domains.)