The Effect Of Social Story Teaching On Social Interaction Of Children With Autism

The social interaction problem of children with autism is not only detrimental to the improvement of their overall social communication ability,but also seriously hamper the development of their social adaptation behavior,leading to their poor integration into normal social life.Therefore,the significance stands out that intervention in social interactions of children with autism is of paramount importance.Among many intervention methods,social story teaching is a cognition-based method which uses brief social stories that describe specific reaction cues in social situations to help children interpret social information,master interactive skills in different social situations and build social awareness.This method is consistent with the characteristics of visual learning advantage of children with autism and plays an important role in the evidence-based practice research of children with autism.The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of social story teaching on social interaction of children with autism.A single-subject experiment using withdrawal design was implemented in this study,including five periods:two baseline periods、two intervention periods and one maintenance period.The experiment lasted for 4 months.The two research objects were students from school for mental retardation in Wuhan.Pictures,voice and videos were incorporated into the social stories.Visual analysis along with questionnaire was used to evaluate the effect of the intervention.The results showed:(1)Social story teaching had immediately effect on social interaction of children with autism.After learning social story,the subjects presented more social interactions,and the average level was also increased significantly.Specific to the type of interaction,there were both commonalities and differences in the effect on the two subjects' interaction.As for their commonality,the frequency of response was much higher than the initiation.The interaction in the action occupied a considerable proportion in the four interactive media.As for their difference,Subject 1 made significant progress in the initiation and response,and the rate of initiation was higher while Subject 2 only showed significant improvement in response.In addition,Subject 1 improved quickly in terms of language interaction while Subject 2 improved faster in terms of action and eye contact.(2)Social story teaching showed maintenance effect on social interaction of children with autism.In the tracking period,the social interactions of the two subjects still maintained a relatively high level.Moreover,both the level and trend of the data showed a steady state.(3)The results of investigation indicated high social validity of teaching social story.Questionnaire survey results showed that the parents and teachers of the two subjects had a positive attitude towards the teaching method and research results of the study.At last,researcher analyzed the factors which affected the effectiveness of social story teaching,and made some suggestions:(1)Carrying out personalized social interaction intervention according to the individual differences of children with autism;(2)Strengthening multi-party cooperation to enhance the effectiveness of social interaction;(3)Optimizing teaching steps to improve the effectiveness of social story teaching.Based on the reflection of this research,researcher provided references for future teaching and research.