Cognitive developmental constraints on the enhancement of interpersonal problem solving

One hundred ninety Preschool through second grade children participated in Shure and Spivak's Cognitive Interpersonal Problem Solving Program. Subjects were identified as exhibiting egocentric thought processes, decentered thought processes, or as transitional between these two phases through the use of several Piagetian tasks. These three groups of children were compared on their pre- to post intervention gains as well as their performance on a learning generalization task. Only the transitional children exhibited significant gains across time on a measure of interpersonal problem solving. No differential performance on the generalization measure was attributable to level of egocentrism/decentrism. It is suggested that transitional children can be accelerated in their acquisition of problem solving behavior through programs such as the one used in the present study. Given, however, that this learning appears to occur in the absence of such training and the receptive subject population is rather limited, the usefulness of these programs is questioned.