PEERS® Purpose

  • PEERS® is an evidence-based social skills intervention through the Hearing and Speech Sciences (HESP) Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. This program is for motivated teens in high school who have difficulty with social interactions and are interested in learning new ways to make and keep friends.
  • During group sessions, teens are taught important social skills and are given the opportunity to practice these skills in session during socialization activities.     ​
  • This social skills program is specifically designed for students who plan on attending a 2- or 4 year college upon completion of high school.

PARENT ROLE:
Parents attend separate 90-minute sessions and are taught how to assist their teens in making and keeping friends. Parents help expand their teen's social network and provide feedback through coaching during weekly socialization homework assignments. 

EFFECT Purpose

This program serves to help teens who have difficulty with the executive functioning skills that help them be more successful with home, school, and social activities.  The teens who would benefit from these group and individual sessions are able to handle the academic rigor that high school and college offers,
but fall short on the executive functioning pieces.  Participants may also work on problem solving skills (stating main and sub-problems to include inferred problems) and Theory of Mind (perspective-taking and reading emotions) skills that can directly impact executive function skills, social interactions and other communication skills. The EFFECT program works best if the student's social skills are not a concern or have been addressed through our PEERS® ​program first.
These weekly 1-hour virtual groups paired with individual 50-minute sessions are run by two certified and licensed Speech-Language Pathologists with extensive experience teaching executive function and social interaction skills.
What is executive functioning?
What is Theory of Mind?
The following articles provide more information of what Theory of Mind entails: 
What is Double Empathy?