Preferred Name
Kimberley Muldoon
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Date of Graduation
Spring 2018
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Education (MEd)
Department
Department of Educational Foundations and Exceptionalities
Advisor(s)
Keri Bethune
Mira Williams
Kitti Robinson
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to explore and expand the literature on strategies to use to develop conversational skills for individuals with ASD. Children with ASD have difficulties creating and maintaining conversations and to participate in the community and its members, conversational skills are necessary to succeed. This study attempts to answer whether video modeling is an effective strategy alone for teaching social conversation skills; if video modeling is effective for increasing the length of conversation units; if external reinforcers are necessary to maintain social conversation skills; and if participants are able to generalize responses to novel topics during untrained neutral/non-preferred conversational units. There were three participants in this study who ranged from middle to high school students whom attend a private school for children with challenging behaviors. All participants are students enrolled in the Autism Program at their school, whom also have intraverbal skills but have deficits with back and forth conversation. The experiment was conducted using a multiple baseline across participants’ design using a video model to increase appropriate body language; staying on topic; responding to questions or comments made by the conversation partner; and changing topics when the conversation partner is uninterested. The results from this study do not support video modeling being an effective strategy alone. The results are inconclusive due to gaps in data and the studying having not been completed.
Recommended Citation
Muldoon, Kimberley, "Developing conversation skills for individuals with Autism spectrum disorders" (2018). Masters Theses, 2010-2019. 537.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/master201019/537
