Teaching Children School Success Skills

Numerous studies have identified attending skills, listening skills, and social skills as being most predictive of long-term school success. A curriculum focusing on those critical learning-social skills was evaluated in 10 preschool classrooms, including 145 children 4 and 5 years of age. Teachers used 5 strategies to teach the learning-social skills. Embedding the strategies systematically into the curriculum by the regular classroom teacher is the unique feature of the approach studied. Children in the 5 treatment classes showed significant gains in attending behavior, listening skills, and behavior rating compared with children in the 5 comparison classrooms. Integrating the systematic teaching of those school success skills into the regular curriculum appears to significantly increase students' performance.