This article, reported in the journal Education and Training in Developmental Disabilities, and published by the Council for Exceptional Children, discusses approaches to teaching Social Skills to students with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Social skill deficits are among the core features of students with Autism Spectrum Disorders, and have been the focus of extensive programming and research over the past decade.  This article reports on an analysis of 38 studies that examine the effectiveness of the research conducted and focuses on the approaches which demonstrated positive outcomes for students.

 

Approaches discussed in the meta-analysis include social stories, peer mediated interventions, video modelling, cognitive behaviour training and others. Targeted behaviours for the studies included maintaining conversation, initiating conversations, greeting others, making requests, playing and turn taking.

 

The authors concluded that while the most common approaches to social skill teaching including social stories, video modelling and peer mediated interventions, all had a strong evidence base; it was the video modelling interventions which proved most effective. Video modelling uses videotaped sequences to model desired behaviours. Videoed sequences enable the student to watch a sequence or set of social behaviours repeatedly until it is committed to memory, enhancing the potential for the student to demonstrate these skills in real life settings. With the age of digital technology, the production of video sessions to assist students to watch and learn appropriate behaviours is now accessible for school practitioners.

 

Interested schools are encouraged to go to the original article and view some of the many examples of video modelling which can found on the World Wide Web.