Social Skills Training for Adolescents With Intellectual Disabilities: A School-Based Evaluation.
A three-week, twice-weekly Superheroes Social Skills club produced large, generalized social gains for four teens with intellectual disability.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Four high-school students with intellectual disability joined a social skills club.
They met twice a week for three weeks. Each 30-minute lesson used the Superheroes Social Skills program.
The teacher showed short hero videos, then used behavioral skills training: explain, model, practice, and feedback.
Researchers tracked three skills with a multiple-baseline design.
What they found
Every teen made big jumps in all three skills.
The gains showed up with new people and in new places—no extra training needed.
How this fits with other research
Schaaf et al. (2015) ran the same hero program with younger children with autism. Their results match this study, showing the package works across ages and diagnoses.
Abney et al. (2026) later shortened the lessons to 20 minutes for preschoolers. They still saw strong gains, proving you can trim the time and keep the punch.
Maddox et al. (2015) looked like a clash at first. They used only video modeling for similar teens and got mixed generalization. The difference: adding BST steps in the 2016 study is what locked the skills in.
Why it matters
You can run this club in any spare classroom period. Two short meetings a week for three weeks are enough to see large, lasting change. Use the hero videos to hook interest, then follow the BST script. If generalization has been spotty with your students, layer in the practice and feedback steps shown here.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) often demonstrate impairments in social functioning, with deficits becoming more apparent during adolescence. This study evaluated the effects of the Superheroes Social Skills program, a program that combines behavioral skills training and video modeling to teach target social skills, on accurate demonstration of three target social skills in adolescents with ID. Skills taught in the present study include Expressing Wants and Needs, Conversation, and Turn Taking. Four adolescents with ID participated in a 3-week social skills intervention, with the intervention occurring twice per week. A multiple baseline across skills design was used to determine the effect of the intervention on social skill accuracy in both a training and generalization setting. All participants demonstrated substantial improvements in skill accuracy in both settings, with teacher ratings of social functioning further suggesting generalization of social skills to nontraining settings.
Behavior modification, 2016 · doi:10.1177/0145445516629938