The paper proposes a model which combines traditional metacognitive explanations for the acquisition of social skills in behaviorally disordered adolescents with situationally specific environment variables. Research is reported suggesting that newly learned social skills may not generalize to a wider variety of real life situations because social ability is specific to situation and task demands. The "meta-behavioral" model stresses the need to consider such variables as situational characteristics, task demands, and personal characteristics in predicting and improving the social skills performance of this population. (Author/DB)