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

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.