Effectiveness of Aggression Replacement Training in Developing Social Skills of Older School Students

Introduction: Aggression replacement training (ART) is a multimodal psychoeducational intervention designed to change aggressive behaviour. The skills acquired during training provide alternative ways of behaving pro-socially. Social competences determine the effectiveness of coping with specific types of social situations and also contribute to building appropriate relationships. Many educational programs that turn out to be exceptionally effective today are directly or indirectly related to social competences. Research Aim: The aim of this text is to find out the effectiveness of ART in developing social skills of older primary school pupils. Method: In this study, a pedagogical experiment was used as the research method. Results: A significant increase in the social skills of pupils participating in the training was indicated. A difference was noticed in the way of understanding and recognising anger control sequences. During the moral reasoning session, the participants experienced looking at the problem from the perspective of different people. Conclusions: The obtained results prove that ART effectively contributes to the increase in social competences. Among people who completed the entire cycle of ART, improvement in behavioural results was noted in all three components of the Training: social skills, anger controland moral reasoning.