Educators, psychologists, speech and language pathologists, school adjustment counselors, and parents can use the teaching guidelines in this manual to help children on the autism spectrum acquire the social perspective taking skills that are so vital to social competency. Beginning with basic nonverbal communication skills such as eye contact and pointing skills, and using concrete, step-by-step instructions, the manual provides systematic teaching programs designed to build progressively more complex social perspective-taking skills, including joint attention and pretend play skills. Identifying and predicting emotions in themselves and others, making social inferences, understanding false and nested belief, and avoiding faux pas are some of the featured skills. Teaching scenarios, with corresponding illustrations designed to enhance comprehension, are provided as well as recommended activities for promoting the generalization of acquired skills. This book includes reproducible materials on CD-ROM.
This workbook expands upon the authors? Teaching Children with Autism to Mind-Read: A Practical Guide to present the most effective approaches, strategies, and practical guidelines to help alleviate social and communication problems in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Complements the best-selling Teaching Children with Autism to Mind-Read: A Practical Guide for use in practical settings Answers the need for more training of professionals in early interventions for children assessed with ASD called for by the National Plan for Autism Written by a team of experts in the field Covers issues such as how to interpret facial expressions; how to recognize feelings of anger, sadness, fear and happiness; how to perceive how feelings are affected by what happens and what is expected to happen; how to see things from another person?s perspective; and how to understand another person?s knowledge and beliefs
Copublished with Context Press Derived Relational Responding offers a series of revolutionary intervention programs for applied work in human language and cognition targeted at students with autism and other developmental disabilities. It presents a program drawn from derived stimulus relations that you can use to help students of all ages acquire foundational and advanced verbal, social, and cognitive skills. The first part of Derived Relational Responding provides step-by-step instructions for helping students learn relationally, acquire rudimentary verbal operants, and develop other basic language skills. In the second section of this book, you'll find ways to enhance students' receptive and expressive repertoires by developing their ability to read, spell, construct sentences, and use grammar. Finally, you'll find out how to teach students to apply the skills they've learned to higher order cognitive and social functions, including perspective-taking, empathy, mathematical reasoning, intelligence, and creativity. This applied behavior analytic training approach will help students make many substantial and lasting gains in language and cognition not possible with traditional interventions.
Background: Interacting with other people involves spatial awareness of one’s own body and the other’s body and viewpoint. In the past, social cognition has focused largely on belief reasoning, which is abstracted away from spatial and bodily representations, while there is a strong tradition of work on spatial and object representation which does not consider social interactions. These two domains have flourished independently. A small but growing body of research examines how awareness of space and body relates to the ability to interpret and interact with others. This also builds on the growing awareness that many cognitive processes are embodied, which could be of relevance for the integration of the social and spatial domains: Online mental transformations of spatial representations have been shown to rely on simulated body movements and various aspects of social interaction have been related to the simulation of a conspecific’s behaviour within the observer’s bodily repertoire. Both dimensions of embodied transformations or mappings seem to serve the purpose of establishing alignment between the observer and a target. In spatial cognition research the target is spatially defined as a particular viewpoint or frame of reference (FOR), yet, in social interaction research another viewpoint is occupied by another’s mind, which crucially requires perspective taking in the sense of considering what another person experiences from a different viewpoint. Perspective taking has been studied in different ways within developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience over the last few decades, yet, integrative approaches for channelling all information into a unified account of perspective taking and viewpoint transformations have not been presented so far. Aims: This Research Topic aims to bring together the social and the spatial, and to highlight findings and methods which can unify research across areas. In particular, the topic aims to advance our current theories and set the stage for future developments of the field by clarifying and linking theoretical concepts across disciplines. Scope: The focus of this Research Topic is on the SPATIAL and the SOCIAL, and we anticipate that all submissions will touch on both aspects and will explicitly attempt to bridge conceptual gaps. Social questions could include questions of how people judge another person’s viewpoint or spatial capacities, or how they imagine themselves from different points of view. Spatial questions could include consideration of different physical configurations of the body and the arrangement of different viewpoints, including mental rotation of objects or viewpoints that have social relevance. Questions could also relate to how individual differences (in personality, sex, development, culture, species etc.) influence or determine social and spatial perspective judgements. Many different methods can be used to explore perspective taking, including mental chronometry, behavioural tasks, EEG/MEG and fMRI, child development, neuropsychological patients, virtual reality and more. Bringing together results and approaches from these different domains is a key aim of this Research Topic. We welcome submissions of experimental papers, reviews and theory papers which cover these topics.
This book provides a positive approach to understanding and educating children on the autism spectrum. The book gives greater insight into the perspective and behavior of a child with autism and explores how the child's learning preferences, strengths and interests can be used to facilitate learning and enhance motivation.
This book discusses the deficits in the development and presentation of play behavior and social skills that are considered central characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The book explains why play provides an important context for social interactions and how its absence can further exacerbate social deficits over time. It highlights the critical roles of social skills in development, and the social, cognitive, communication, and motor components of play. Chapters offer conceptually and empirically sound play and social skills interventions for children with ASD. Play activities using diverse materials and including interactions with peers and parents are designed to promote positive, effective social behaviors and encourage continued development. The book provides unique strategies that can be tailored to fit individual children’s strengths and deficits. Topics featured in this book include: Naturalistic Teaching Strategies (NaTS) for developing play and social skills. Teaching play and social skills with video modeling. Peer-mediated intervention (PMI) strategies that promote positive social interactions between children with ASD and their peers. Visual Activity Schedules and Scripts. Parent-implemented play and social skills intervention. Play and Social Skills for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder is a must-have resource for researchers, clinicians, and graduate students in clinical child and school psychology, behavioral therapy/rehabilitation, social work, public health, and related psychology, education, and behavioral health fields.
This collection of cues will enable parents and professionals to help children with social development difficulties navigate their social world and enjoy interacting with their peers. Each section begins with a simple rule; the reason why the child may be having difficulty in this area is explained; and easy prompts and practice ideas are provided.
Typed Words, Loud Voices is written by a coalition of writers who type to talk and believe it is neither logical nor fair that some people should be expected to prove themselves every time they have something to say.
Building a child’s “social repertoire” for more effective autism treatment. Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are an alarmingly prevalent topic of conversation in the news, in pediatrician and therapists’ offices, in classrooms, among concerned parents, and at home, within families. The rate of diagnoses seems only to rise. It’s not surprising that professionals who work with kids on the autism spectrum are eager for effective resources on how to help children and their parents or caregivers manage it. And with this book, readers have a new tool to add to their arsenal. Drawing on her work at the Yale Child Study Center, Koenig explains how critical it is for kids to not simply learn new social skills that fit their individual needs, but to be able to seamlessly integrate them into a range of day-to-day situations, from the classroom to the lunchroom to the dinner table at home. Building their "social repertoire" in this way, she argues, is key to effective autism treatment. Unlike other autism books that tend to be prescriptive in their approach to social skills training, this one teaches that the best social interventions are evidence-based, child-specific, and meaningfully integrated. Guiding readers through the overarching considerations and principles for designing successful social interventions, Koenig presents a host of specific techniques—visual strategies and supports, scripts and role play, developmental play approaches, video modeling, peer mediated approaches, technology-based instruction, group instruction, self-monitoring strategies, parent-delivered interventions, and much more. Case vignettes illustrate how each intervention can be implemented, and what trouble-shooting techniques can be used when a child isn’t responding well. Koenig also provides advice on how parents and professionals can work together as a team, how to help kids “generalize” their newly learned skills across contexts, and how to measure progress in a sensible way. With a foreword by renowned child psychiatrist Fred Volkmar, Practical Social Skills for Autism Spectrum Disorders is sophisticated in its methodology but highly accessible, hands-on, and user-friendly. An invaluable manual for clinicians, educators, school counselors and administrators, parents, and all those who work with kids on the autism spectrum, it unravels the nuances of effective social skills training by showing how to really create intervention programs that take kids' own aptitudes and needs into account. With time, the right teaching, and compassion, they can achieve a life of full engagement with their families and communities.
