Assessing Social Perception Abilities in Learning Disabled Students

According to clinical observations and experimental investigations of learning disabled students, these individuals experience more difficulty than their nondisabled peers in accurately recognizing and interpreting social cues. It has been suggested that such social perception deficits may be responsible for many of the problems which learning disabled children experience in their everyday social encounters with peers and teachers. For this reason, many special educators have advocated the development of specific remedial activities to ameliorate these deficits. Prior to any widespread implementation of remedial efforts, the data base upon which the deficits were identified must be carefully evaluated. The purpose of this article is to: (a) review experimental attempts at assessing the social perception skills of learning disabled children, (b) discuss methodological concerns relative to these experiments, and (c) suggest possible directions for future social perception research.