Association for Behavior Analysis International

Social-communication difficulties of adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can significantly interfere with their participation in high school activities, where conversation is the primary mode of social interaction. Interventions are needed not only to address these deficits, but also to facilitate social interactions with peers, yet few high school social-communication interventions exist. A nonconcurrent multiple-baseline design across participants was used to assess the effects of a peer-mediated intervention implemented during lunch on the conversational skills of four high school students with ASD. The intervention consisted of training peers the three strategies to promote initiations, maintain conversations, and promote follow-up questions. In addition, focus students were taught how to use visual supports to initiate and extend topics. Peers implemented the intervention during lunch without direct adult involvement and items on cue cards were faded. In addition, probes assessing generalization of conversational gains across a novel trained peer, from another peer network and a novel untrained peer were collected following post-training. Results (10-m observational samples) indicated that focus students increased initiations and follow-up questions following the sequential introduction of each training component (Figure 1). Additional data revealed total number of conversational acts (Figure 2) and assertive acts (Fig. 3) increased for all participants and peers, suggesting that the once passive conversationalists were becoming more assertive. Additionally, probes revealed some generalization of learned skills to novel peers. Social validity measures involving the focus students, peers, and educators naive to the intervention attested to intervention acceptability and outcome quality. This study represents a comprehensive extension of peer-mediation to high school settings.

Socialization and play are essential component of any childs life. Individuals with disabilities, particularly individuals with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience persistent deficits in socialization, communication, friendships, and community integration (Alpern & Zager, 2007; Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Burtenshaw, & Hobson, 2007; Durkin, Boyle, Hunter, & Conti-Ramsden, 2013). These challenges remain problematic throughout life, and directly affect postsecondary transitions and outcomes, specifically college participation, independent living, and employment (Shattuck 2013). Innovations with technology and digital communication may offer solutions to increase postsecondary education successes for young adults with ASD by creating and reinforcing opportunities for positive social interactions. One such method that has generated much attention are massively multiplayer online role-playing games and related augmentative virtual games such as Pokmon Go. A small but significant body of research has begun to emerge, documenting the benefits of gaming utilizing a complex, diverse, realistic, and social medium (Gallup, et al., 2016; Granic, Lobel, Rutger, & Engels, 2014). Further, researchers have suggested that video games may foster real-world psychosocial benefits (Granic et al., 2014), and support friendships and social interactions within the community environment (Gallup et al., 2016). An interesting phenomena of Pokmon Go is that the game has bridged the gap between virtual and physical environment. Additionally, results indicate that individuals with ASD and increased their social interactions and desire to interact within the community.