Association for Behavior Analysis International

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other developmental disabilities are likely to experience difficulties socially interacting with their peers during natural routines, including play times at school or home. Additionally, children with developmental disabilities may have difficulty forming friendships or report lower quality of friendships as well as increased loneliness, peer rejection, or bullying. Social behavior and social play are important areas of child development and may require explicit intervention procedures and supports. This symposium is comprised of four presentations of original datasets. Each study evaluated an intervention to increase social skills between children with ASD or other developmental disabilities and their typically-developing peers. The interventions targeted social skills including responding to peer bids for joint attention, taking turns during imaginary play activities, recess skills, and taking game turns during playdates. Intervention components consisted of environmental arrangement, prompting, reinforcement, use of video scene displays in an augmentative and alternative communication device (AAC), and direct instruction (DI). Key takeaways are that children and their peers may require systematic teaching procedures in natural environments in order to fully benefit during social routines.

This event is appropriate for practitioners and researchers working in classrooms or homes of children with developmental disabilities.

Children need opportunities to practice social skills outside of school, and a common means for this is through playdates. There are few studies examining methods to teach children with ASD social skills during playdates and have included children with advanced language skills, such as the ability to ask questions to peers. In the current study, we examined a parent-implemented packaged intervention aimed at embedding instruction in early social skills during playdates in the home of the child with ASD. A concurrent multiple-probe across parent-child-peer triads single-case design was employed. Data were collected on parent treatment fidelity and frequency of child and peer mands (e.g., requesting a turn) and child and peer responses to mands (e.g., passing the game die). During the coaching phase, parents were taught the steps of the packaged intervention, which included a social narrative, activity schedule, environmental arrangement, prompting, and reinforcement strategies. Parents were taught to embed social skills instruction within the context of game play. During baseline, low levels of treatment fidelity, child, and peer behaviors were observed for all three triads. Upon implementation of coaching, an immediate increase in level of independent correct steps of treatment fidelity was observed for triads one and two. An immediate increase in level and trend was observed for child behavior and peer behavior for triad one. An immediate increase in level and trend was observed for child behavior and peer responses, with moderate changes observed for peer mands for triad two. A small change in level was observed for parent, child, and peer behaviors in triad three. Due to emergence of child challenging behavior and a decreasing trend in target behaviors for triad three, a procedural modification was employed. Following the procedural modification, an immediate increase in level was observed in parent treatment fidelity, and moderate changes in level for child mands and peer behaviors were observed. This pilot study suggests that training parents of children with ASD to implement evidence-based strategies with their child and a peer may be an effective means to support early social skills, but that child challenging behavior and communication needs may affect outcomes.