A Study On The Relationships Of Social Goals, Social Behavior And Peer Acceptance Of Children With Learning Disabilities

Children with learning disabilities are in quantity. The research discovered that they have emotional and behavior problem contributing to serious difficulties in their peer relationships. Not only they themselves suffer from too much pain, but also is a burden for overall improving education quality. The research on social development of children with learning disabilities has made certain achievement, but past research mainly focused on making sure basic position of social development and relationships of each element. With the appearance of psychology of information processing, people begin to explore the deep mechanism of children with learning disabilities from social information processing obstacles.A model of social information processing was proposed by Dodge and his colleagues, which includes: encoding of external and internal cues, interpretation of those cues, selection of goals, response generation and assessment, response enactment. Children's attributions of intent and social goals play important roles in it.Personal goals have been of central importance in models of motivation and explanations of behavior. Past research indicated that goals to behave in socially appropriate ways have been related positively to displays of socially appropriate behavior. Erdley's research improved that control and dominant goals are important for aggressive children, while avoidance goals are important for withdrawn children. The research on peer relationships indicated that rejected children were inclined to pursue inappropriate goals in social situation, low acceptance children are less prosocial and friendly on their goals. Past research on preschool and primary children indicated that many rejected children in social interaction showed high level aggressive behavior, while social withdrawn children were characteristic of extremely low self-evidence and poor social interaction. So we hypothesized that rejected children included highly obedient and manipulated children,highly aggressive children.Past research on social goals, social behavior and peer relationships of children with learning disabilities mainly focused on each other's relationships. In this study, we considered three factors together so that we can systematically explore the relationships of these factors. The research on social cognition and behavior process of peer relationships has two strategies: one is whole strategy, the other is situation strategy. Putallaz and Sheppard considered that consistent behavior across situations can't predict competent children, but can predict adjustment behavior. Social competent children show different behavior in different situation, so behavior can only be appraised in certain situation. In order to study the difference of children's goals, this research take situation method to use ambiguous provocation situation as instrument to study children's multiple social goals in reporting different behavior response. Past research mostly focused on kindergarten and preschool students, this research aim at studying the problem of social development of children with learning disabilities on high grades of primary school.According to the standard of classifying children with learning disabilities, this research examples 173 students from fourth grade, fifth grade and sixth grade in eight primary schools. Measured by questionnaire, we have 133 available subject and they were interviewed individually. Finally we nominate them using class play. The data collected was processed with SPSS 10.0.Our study reveals that:1. Prosocial goals are an effective predictor to problem solving behavior, hostile goals are an effective predictor to aggressive behavior and avoidance goals are an effective predictor to withdrawn behavior.2. The correlation of different goals and peer acceptance is not significant, while the correlation of behavior of peer evaluated and peer acceptance is significant. Goals can directly predict peer acceptance, but mostly influence peer acceptance through behavior. Prosocial behavior s...