Conflict education and special‐needs students, part two: Improving conflict competence and emotional competence

Abstract

Although special‐needs students are typified by emotional and behavioral disabilities that are critical to their conflict orientation and conflict behavior, very little work has been done to bring conflict education programs to them; even less has been done to explore the efficacy of these interventions. This article reports on the impact of conflict education training provided to thirteen upper school classes of a special‐needs population in a private school setting. Training was delivered in sessions of one hour once a week for a three‐month period. It was hypothesized that conflict education would increase students' perspective taking and emotional management and decrease their hostile attribution and aggression. Self‐report, other‐report, and behavioral data were obtained to assess impact. Results indicated that there was no impact on perspective taking. Impact for emotional management was in the predicted direction for the self‐report data, but in the opposite direction for the other‐report data from teacher ratings. There was strong support for the hypothesis that conflict education would reduce hostile attribution and partial support for the expectation that it would reduce aggressiveness. Impacts on aggressive behavior were influenced by the cognitive ability of the student.

Cognitive—Behavioral Interventions, Dropout, and Youth With Disabilities

“…The remaining five studies reported age ranges for their participants, and these spanned the 12-to 19-year age range. Most studies' participants were either exclusively male or mostly male, two studies (Bodtker, 2001;Larson & Gerber, 1987) did not report gender proportions, and one study (LeCroy, 1988) involved exclusively female participants.…”

“…Finally, the majority of studies that reported sample attrition rates (57%) lost no participants in the research process. Three studies did not report attrition rates (Bodtker, 2001;Etscheidt, 1991;LeCroy, 1988). Among the studies that did report a measurable attrition rate, these rates ranged from 8% in the Dangel, Deschner, and Rasp (1989) study to 38% in one of the treatment groups in the Barkley et al (2001) study.…”

“…Single-Group Pretest-Posttest Designs. Two studies reported on the effects of training youth with aggressive behaviors on anger control/conflict education curricula (Bodtker, 2001;Dangel et al, 1989). In both cases, there were substantive deviations from a traditional single-group pretest-posttest design.…”

Conflict resolution education: The field, the findings, and the future

“…All treatment classrooms showed significant increases in moral reasoning ability and constructive conflict orientation. In a two-year study of the impact of a conflict education curriculum in middle and high school special-needs students (in an alternative disciplinary school), researchers found that the conflict curriculum had a significant impact on students' misconduct rates, hostile attribution, and aggressive orientation (Jones and Bodtker, 1999;Bodtker, 2001). …”