Social Skills and Self-Efficacy for Exceptional Children

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Abstract
Personal competence, or an individual's sense of mastery over the environment, is a primary motivator of human behavior. The special education enterprise thrives on the discovery of personal incompetence in children so this incompetence can be remediated. This article suggests that mainstreaming efforts have been largely unsuccessful because of the faulty assumptions underlying such efforts, the focus on academic attainment for handicapped children, and the failure to reasonably consider the social development of handicapped children. Self-efficacy theory is used as a basis to support the above argument, as a basis for the refocusing of the mainstreaming process, and as a basis for teaching positive social behaviors to mainstreamed handicapped children.