Developing a Creative Interpersonal Problem Solving Training Program and Evaluating its Effectiveness on Social Skills of Gifted Elementary Students

Improving interpersonal problem solving skills in gifted students would facilitate their confrontation with everyday conflict situations. Due to the necessity of these skills in the lives of the gifted students, a creative interpersonal problem solving training program was developed, and its effectiveness on social skills of the elementary gifted students was evaluated. The design of the study was semi-experimental with pretest-posttest and control group. Among 5 different 4th grade classes in an all-girl school in north Tehran, two were randomly selected and assigned as experimental and control groups. The students in these two classes were screened by the Raven Progressive Matrix of Intelligence (1938) and the Tehran Stanford-Binet test of intelligence (Afrooz & Hooman, 1996). The experiment group participated in the interpersonal creative problem solving program, and the control group did not receive any treatment. Teacher form of Social Skills Rating Scale (Gresham and Elliott, 1990) was used to measure their social skills. The obtained data were analyzed using repeated measures analysis of the variance showed significant differences (p