The effectiveness of video modeling with children with social communication difficulties secondary to Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

There is a substantial amount of research evidence to show that video modeling (VM) can help enhance the social communication (SC) skills of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (e.g., Bellini & Akullian, 2007; Shukla-Mehta, Miller & Callahan, 2010). VM is a visually-based intervention in which learning is achieved through imitation of a model demonstrating the target skill that is shown on a video (Bellini & Akullian, 2007). Despite it being a promising intervention, after reviewing the literature, the researcher found the need for more research which uses the strengths and minimises the limitations of previous research on VM. The purpose of this study was to determine whether VM could improve the SC skills, more specifically, greetings, eye-contact, topic-maintenance and turn-taking, of three children diagnosed with ASD and aged between 7;0 to 9;0 years. A mixed research design combining a quantitative ABA single-subject experimental design with a qualitative case-study approach was used. During intervention, the participants watched commercial videos, which depicted peer models demonstrating the target skills, for three weeks. The intervention was implemented by parents at home. All participants showed some improvement in the four target skills, which generalised across persons and settings. In most cases, the skills were also maintained for three weeks after intervention was terminated. These results added to the growing literature on VM, by giving further indications that VM can be successfully used to teach SC skills to children with ASD. The need for further research in this area was also highlighted.