| This study evaluates creative dance as a practical and beneficial resource for supporting social competence in children with autism in schools. As an alternative to activities emphasizing skills that children with autism have difficulty with, such as verbal communication, creative dance capitalizes on areas of strength, potentially resulting in more opportunities to gain social feedback vital for achieving social competence.;Challenges of research in this field include assessing individual gains related to group activities, and measuring gains exhibited over brief periods of time. To address these challenges, hierarchical linear growth modeling was applied in this analysis to compare data collected on students with autism participating in creative dance and "circle-time," a typical classroom activity with similar social objectives. The three main findings of this analysis are: (1) verbal students with autism initially demonstrated a higher level of social competence in the circle-time condition, but improved at a slightly faster rate in the creative dance condition on average, (2) nonverbal students performed similarly in each condition at first, but also improved at a faster rate in the dance condition on average, and (3) the performance gap in social competence between verbal and nonverbal students with autism is smaller in the creative dance condition than in the circle-time condition across measurement occasions. The latter finding may be especially relevant in the context of inclusive education, indicating not only that creative dance is especially beneficial to nonverbal students with autism, but also that creative dance may be an activity in which students with language impairments perform more similarly to their non-disabled peers. |
