Competence and its correlates in young normal and referred school children

Abstract

Normal and referred primary-grade school children were compared on several sociopsychological and competence measures. Teachers knew and liked normals significantly better than referred children, judged them to have significantly less serious problems, and saw them as significantly stronger on all competence measures. Knowing a child well, liking him, and seeing him as having few problems, related significantly to estimates of competence both in the normal and referred samples. Those relationships were stronger for normals. Mental health's past narrow focus on casualty and its repair has begun to yield to an emphasis on promoting competence from the start. A factor contributing to that thrust is the mounting evidence of systematic relationships between maladjustment and deficits in specific interpersonal cognitive problem-solving (ICPS) skills such as alternative, means-end, and consequential thinking (Spivack, Platt, & Shure, 1976; Spivack & Shure, 1977; Spivack & Levine, Note 1; Platt, Altman, & Altman, Note 2). Such findings have been interpreted to mean that children who acquire social problem-solving skills, compared to those who do not, have a more useful technology for meeting interpersonal problem situations effectively. They, thus, adapt better and appear, to observers, to be better adjusted behaviorally. That way of thinking has led to the development of several successful programs to train children in specific ICPS skills (e.g., Allen, Chinsky, Larcen, Locbanan, & Selinger, 1976; Stone, Hinds, & Schmidt, 1975; Elardo & Cooper, 1977; Gesten, Flores de Apodaca, Rains, Weissberg, & Cowen, 1979; Spivack et