Video modelling in School Age Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Giada Nali, Valentina Buriani
The article describes a project arised from the desire to verify the effectiveness of video modelling technique in the teaching of pragmatic-social skills and their generalisation in all contexts of life. The reference sample consists of six children diagnosed with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder. By analysing the subjects’ characteristics, the project was developed with the aim of improving the communication deficit, in particular in the pragmatic sphere. Project realisation involved the use of the video modelling technique. The project included the identification of a sample later evaluated with the APL Medea test by M.L. Lorusso (2009) for exploring pragmatic skills. On the other hand, the children’s parents compiled D.V.M. Bishop’s Children’s Communication Checklist (CCC-2; 2013). Thanks to these assessments, we were able to identify the lacking communicative-pragmatic areas common to all subjects: namely verbal and figurative metaphors, comprehension of the implicit meaning and everyday life situations. We created two videos following the video modelling technique, the first focused on pragmatic communication while the second focused on social communication. There was a subsequent experimentation phase with the administration of the videos over five individual meetings, with weekly sessions of about 30 minutes for 3 months. To follow up the subjects’ progress, we also created specific evaluation protocols for each video. Finally, the data was re-evaluated and analysed to demonstrate our goal.
Keywords
Autism, Video modelling, Social skills, Pragmatic skills, School age.
