Intervention Setting. Gresham et al. (2001) noted that
the weak outcomes of social skills interventions can be attributed
to the fact that these interventions often take place in
“contrived, restricted, and decontextualized” (p. 340) settings,
such as resource rooms or other pullout settings. According to
Gresham et al., this “decontextualized” programming leads
to poor maintenance and generalization effects. The results
of the present meta-analysis support this assertion; that is,
maintenance and generalization effects were significantly
lower for interventions that were implemented in pullout settings.
In contrast, interventions that were implemented in the
child’s typical classroom setting produced higher maintenance
effects and higher generalization effects across participants,
settings, and play stimuli. In addition to higher
maintenance and generalization effects, the results of the
present study also suggest that interventions implemented in
the child’s typical classroom produce higher intervention effects.
This finding has important implications for schoolbased
social skills interventions. Teachers and other school
personnel should place a premium on selecting social skills
interventions that can be reasonably implemented in multiple
naturalistic settings. This is particularly important for children
with ASD, who may have considerable difficulties with
transferring skills from one setting to another. Future research
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Volume 28, Number 3, May/June 2007
should be conducted to examine this finding more comprehensively.
For instance, comparison studies can be conducted
to examine the differential effects of identical interventions
implemented in multiple settings.