Introduction
Children and adolescents under the age of 15 make up about a quarter of Iran’s population [1]. Education in the early years of life plays an important role in learning social skills [2], and affects the person’s future life [3] and even psychological adjustment in adulthood [4]. Teaching social skills to children is necessary to live in today’s world [5]. Social skills are the skills that we use every day to interact and communicate with others. They include verbal and non-verbal communication, such as speech, facial expression, gesture and body language [8]. Having social skills at school is of particular importance. Starting conversation, understanding speech, hearing, sympathy, problem solving, and apologizing are some of social skills that children need to acquire [10]. These skills can be provided to students through classroom-based behavioral interventions [11]. There are some studies that support the efficacy of these interventions provided by teacher on children’s social skills and behavioral problems [8]. The current study aims to determine the effect of Social Skills Training (SST) by training teachers on mental health of female primary school students.
Methods
This is a quasi-experimental study with a pre-test/post-test design conducted on female third-grade primary school students in Rasht, Iran in 2017-18. Parents and teachers completed questionnaires before and after intervention. The sessions were held during the school year. For SST of students, intervention was provided to their teacher who was in daily contact with them. Methods of cognitive behavioral skills and positive reinforcement were used for SST of students. The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and Matson Evaluation of Social Skills with Youngsters (MESSY) was used to assess mental health and social skills of students, respectively. Data were analyzed using statistical tests including Wilcoxon test and paired t-test in SPSS v.21 software. 
Results
In this study, 24 nine-year-old female primary school students participated. The mean age of their mothers and fathers was 37.79±3.32 and 41.08±4.42 years, respectively. Most of their mothers (70.8%) and fathers (58.3%) had bachelor’s degree. All students were living with their parents. According to parents, the mean total score of MESSY decreased significantly from 225.54±13.65 to 219.12±18.59 after the intervention (P=0.033). Moreover, according to the teacher, among the subscales of SDQ (mental health), the mean subscale of hyperactivity-attention deficit decreased from 3.95±2.49 to 2.62±1.55 after the intervention, which was statistically significant (P=0.020).
Discussion
Based on the results of the present study, it can be said that, from the parents’ point of view, no positive change in their children’s behavior was observed after SST by teacher in the classroom. The teacher observed improvement in all domains of SDQ, but this improvement was significant only in the hyperactivity-attention deficit domain. Based on the MESSY score, parents did not report any positive change after intervention, while some changes were reported by the teacher but they were not significant. These results are not consistent with the findings of Han et al. [8] and Finlon et al. [12], but are in line with the results of Grillich et al., who reported no significant difference between case and control groups in terms of social and emotional experiences in school, physical activity, happiness and attention [13]. In most studies, educational interventions for SST have been performed by child and adolescent psychologists or mental health experts [14, 15, 16, 17]. The results indicates the importance of the scientific knowledge and practical experience of teacher for SST. The SST of students by teacher in our study did not show a significant positive effect on mental health and social skills of female school students. Perhaps the training provided to the teacher was not sufficient or the individual characteristics of the teacher influenced the results.

Ethical Considerations
Compliance with ethical guidelines
All procedures in this study were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Ethics Committee of Guilan University of Medical Sciences and with the Helsinki Declaration (Code: IR.GUMS.REC.1396.413). It was also presented and approved by the Research Center of the General Directorate of Education and Training of Gilan Province. Ethics is fully observed in these principles. Allow participants to leave the study at any time. Also, all participants were informed about the research process and their information was confidential.

Funding
This study was funded by the Deputy for Research and Technology of Guilan University of Medical Sciences, Rasht (Grant number: 96090409).

Authors' contributions
All authors equally contributed to preparing this article.

Conflicts of interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the students, teachers and principal of Baran-e Andishe School, and Fatemeh Eslamdoust and Somayeh Omidzahir for their cooperation.


References

1. Vakiliyan M. [Taghir sakhtare herami seni jamiyat az sale 1393 (Persian)]. Paper presented at: Tenth Congress of the Pioneers of Progress. 19 May 2015; Tehran, National Library of Iran.http://fa.seminars.sid.ir/ViewPaper.aspx?ID=64318
2. Naraghi M, Ghobadian M, Naderi A, Shariatmadari A.[Research community an effective way of social development of children (Persian)]. Thinking and Child. 2011; 2(2):37-58. https://fabak.ihcs.ac.ir/article_527_b11fe86a79b87b6065f95aaa5565da80.pdf  
3. Yavarian R, Haghighi M. [Study of social-emotional skills development problems among children, aged 1-6 years(Persian)]. The Journal of Urmia University of Medical Sciences. 2013; 23(6):685-91. http://umj.umsu.ac.ir/article-1-1577-fa.html
4. Razani O, Abdeyazdan Z. [Comparison of social skills of preschool children in single-parent families and two- parent Families in Doroud city (Persian)]. Journal of Nursing Development in Health. 2018; 8(2):31-8. http://ndhj.lums.ac.ir/article-1-166-fa.html
5. Adeniyi YC, Omigbodun OO. Effect of a classroom-based intervention on the social skills of pupils with intellectual disability in Southwest Nigeria. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health. 2016; 10(1):29. [PMID]
6. Kazempour E, Torabnezhad S. [The impact of group discussion education on students’ social skills (Persian)]. Quarterly Journal of Educational Psychology. 2017; 3(8):49-62. https://journals.iau.ir/article_603780_db7f92f0f9b9b4ab78e07555edb9b31b.pdf
7. Cohen DM. The efficacy of the stepping stones social skills development program [BA. thesis] Ohio: College of Wooster; 2016. https://openworks.wooster.edu/independentstudy/7075/
8. Han SS, Catron T, Weiss B, Marciel KK. A teacher-consultation approach to social skills training for pre-kindergarten children: Treatment model and short-term outcome effects. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology. 2005; 33(6):681-93. [DOI:10.1007/s10802-005-7647-1] [PMID]
9. Longobardi C, Settanni M, Lin S, Fabris MA. Student-teacher relationship quality and prosocial behaviour: The mediating role of academic achievement and a positive attitude towards school. The British Journal of Educational Psychology. 2021; 91(2):547-62. [DOI:10.1111/bjep.12378] [PMID]
10. Magro SW, Fraley RC, Roisman GI. Early maternal sensitivity and teacher-student relationship quality across grade school: Enduring or transient associations? Child Development. 2020; 91(4):e883-901. [DOI:10.1111/cdev.13322] [PMID] [PMCID]
11. Ghaemi SZ, Khakshour A, Abasi Z, Hajikhani Golchin NA. Effectiveness of school-based program to preventing mental disorders in school age children: Review Article. Reviews in Clinical Medicine. 2015; 2(3):118-24. https://www.sid.ir/en/Journal/ViewPaper.aspx?ID=484419
12. Finlon KJ, Izard CE, Seidenfeld A, Johnson SR, Cavadel EW, Ewing ESK, et al. Emotion-based preventive intervention: Effectively promoting emotion knowledge and adaptive behavior among at-risk preschoolers. Development and Psychopathology. 2015; 27(4pt1):1353-65. [DOI:10.1017/S0954579414001461] [PMID] [PMCID]
13. Grillich L, Kien C, Takuya Y, Weber M, Gartlehner G. Effectiveness evaluation of a health promotion programme in primary schools: A cluster randomised controlled trial. BMC Public Health. 2016; 16:679. [DOI:10.1186/s12889-016-3330-4] [PMID]
14. Vahedi S, Fathiazar E, Hosseini-Nasab SD, Moghaddam M, Kiani A. The effect of social skills training on decreasing the aggression of pre-school children. Iranian Journal of Psychiatry. 2007; 2(3):108-14. https://www.sid.ir/en/Journal/ViewPaper.aspx?ID=128545
15. Irannezhad S. Effectiveness of life-skills training on the mental health of 2nd grade female High School students in Bam-Iran. Bali Medical Journal. 2017; 6(3):583. [DOI:10.15562/bmj.v6i3.635]
16. Fathollahzadeh N, Bagheri P, Rostami M, Darbani SA. [Effectiveness of social skills training on adaptation and selfefficacy of high school girl students (Persian)]. Journal of Applied Psychology. 2017; 10 (4):271-89. https://apsy.sbu.ac.ir/article_96611.html?lang=fa
17. Farid Marandi B, Kakabaraee K, Hosseini SA. [The effect of problem-solving training on social skills of preschool children (Persian)]. Quarterly Journal of Child Mental Health. 2020; 6(4):131-43. [DOI:10.29252/jcmh.6.4.13].
18. Iranian Association of Child/ Adolescent Psychiatry. [Educational package of “Life Skills for Children 6 to 12 years old” educational program (Persian)]. Tehran: Mental Health Office of the Ministry of Health.
19. Yousefi F, Khayer M. [Reliability and validity of Matson’s social skills scale and comparing the performance of girls and boys in it (Persian)]. Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities of Shiraz University. 2002; 18(2):147-58. https://www.sid.ir/fa/journal/ViewPaper.aspx?id=19674
20. Shahrivar Z, Tehrani-Doost M, Pakbaz B, Rezaie A, Ahmadi F. Normative data and psychometric properties of the parent and teacher versions of the strengths and difficulties questionnaire (SDQ) in an Iranian community sample. Journal of Research in Medical Sciences . 2009; 14(2):69-77. [PMID]