Development and Evaluation of a Social Foresight Curriculum for At-Risk Youth.

Traditionally, school-based approaches to remediating deficits in social competence have focused on building aspects of temperament and character. The Socially Adept Verbalizations of Youth (SAVY) Curriculum, consisting of a series of exercises and activities, preceded by brief introductory lessons, was designed to develop social judgment skills in socially incompetent youths by decreasing egocentrism and by heightening their perspective-taking skills. To collect preliminary validation data on the curriculum, 17 adolescent students with behavior problems, who were attending an alternative inner city high school, were exposed to the SAVY curriculum as a 2-week module emphasizing social foresight, i.e., anticipating the consequences to oneself of various interpersonal actions. A control group (N=15) participated in the regular mental health course without the SAVY curriculum. A teacher-rated, modified version of the Acting Out, Moodiness, and Learning (AML) checklist was used to assess effects of the curriculum on behavioral adjustment. An analysis of the results showed that the experimental group demonstrated significantly greater rated behavioral improvement than the control group. This finding suggests that social foresight training may be of potential benefit in school-based intervention programs aimed at adolescents with behavior problems. (Author/BL)