Association between social skills and academic performance of visually impaired students in regular education

• Grant number: 15/00991-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: July 01, 2015
• End date: June 30, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Luciana Carla dos Santos Elias
• Grantee: Ana Luzia Lemes Pinto
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Ribeirão Preto (FFCLRP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Ribeirão Preto , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the association between social skills (SS) and academic performance of visually impaired (VI) students in regular education. In addition to the educational content learning, interations at school are important for the individuals repertories of the VI. In this context, the SS are characterized as behavior classes that promote productive relationships with others; if the VI has a positive SS repertoire, he will be able to organize thoughts, feelings and actions according to the contextual demands, maximizing his interactions. Besides that, a poor SS repertoire confers difficulties in interpersonal relationships and possible behavioral problems. In particularly, the academic performance shows high correlations with the SS. This research will be conducted in a public school of Scondary School and High School, which is reference on serving VI students, so the study will be consisted of a convinience sample, depending on the number of enrolled students, and their teachers. The instruments used to collect data will be : Social Skills Inventory for Teenagers - IHSA (Del Prette & Del Prette, 2009); The measurement Instrument of Socio-Emotional Skills (Santos and Primi, 2014);Survey of social skills and behavior problems of teenagers in schools and; average of the student grades. Data analysis involves associations between SS, academic performance and behavior problems. The quantitative results will be translated into spreadsheets SPSS and will be conducted relevant statistics analyzes; the answers of the evaluated classes will be also analyzed qualitatively.