A Study of Social Skills Intervention for Children with ASD Using Learning Apps.

the primary goal of this single-subject study was to examine the effects of using mobile learning apps on the social skills of three preschool children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). A secondary goal was to gain an in-depth understanding of the teacher's perceptions of the feasibility and value of the intervention. Navigating appropriate social skills for children with autism is a major challenge for the teacher of these children. It is argued that children with autism may be less motivated to imitate by social interaction, but may be motivated to imitate to receive a non-social reward. So we used the mobile learning apps to give the children with ASD an opportunity to demonstrate their social language, and to make the modelling examples much more meaningful. The apps used for teaching the children with ASD included 'Cuedin-Autism Early Intervention App ', 'Autism Help', 'Social skills for Autism KLoog2' and an app made by ourselves that fits the individualized scenarios of each subject in this study, because children with ASD vary widely in their skills, interests and needs. Three young children diagnosed with autism participated in this study. Intervention for the children with ASD was implemented by their teachers and an A-B-A-B single-case research experimental design was used to assess the differences between the non-embedded and embedded social conditions. The teachers taught the children to use the apps in some embedded social interaction conditions. Prior to the start of the study, child-preferred items and activities were determined for each child. All sessions were conducted once a week for two hours in the kindergarten. After all the experiment sessions were implemented, the teachers were asked to complete the 'The Teacher Perception Measure'- a 26 item questionnaire to rate the teachers' perceptions of students' social skills. Overall, this mobile learning apps intervention resulted in substantial improvements in social skills and teacher perceptions of the feasibility and worth of the intervention were reported as highly favourable. Limitations and future directions for research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]