Teaching Texting on a Smart Phone to Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
type: CreativeWork
description: Children and adolescents diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have deficits in social communication ( Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -5th edition, APA, 2013). These deficits are significantly pronounced when individuals with ASD attempt to engage in conversations. Due to advances in technology, children and adolescents are now conversing through computer mediated communication (CMC; Pew, 2015, 2018). Texting in particular is one popular form of CMC that may mitigate the non-verbal social skill deficits seen in individuals with ASD, such as eye contact and tone of voice. Despite the potential of texting and its' popularity as a CMC medium among typically developing children and adolescents, no research currently exists on teaching texting to individuals with ASD. The present study therefore aimed to increase the social communication skills of the participants by teaching five children and adolescents with ASD to maintain a back and forth conversation through text. This study was a non-concurrent multiple baseline design across dyads. The study involved two texting interventions; the first focused on the steps needed to send a text and the second examined teaching texting content. The texting step intervention was taught using a total-task chaining procedure to teach each of the steps illustrated in the texting guidebook, which was designed specifically for the current study. The second intervention used a multiple exemplar approach (two conversation samples) that were interspersed across sessions and participants. Both interventions were implemented using the guidebooks combined with prompting. The participants were paired together, resulting in three dyads. In two of the dyads, both of the participants had an ASD diagnosis. The third dyad included one participant with ASD and one typically developing peer. Training sessions were conducted in a lounge setting at an after-school behavioral treatment center and in the children’s respecti…
abstract: Children and adolescents diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have deficits in social communication ( Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -5th edition, APA, 2013). These deficits are significantly pronounced when individuals with ASD attempt to engage in conversations. Due to advances in technology, children and adolescents are now conversing through computer mediated communication (CMC; Pew, 2015, 2018). Texting in particular is one popular form of CMC that may mitigate the non-verbal social skill deficits seen in individuals with ASD, such as eye contact and tone of voice. Despite the potential of texting and its' popularity as a CMC medium among typically developing children and adolescents, no research currently exists on teaching texting to individuals with ASD. The present study therefore aimed to increase the social communication skills of the participants by teaching five children and adolescents with ASD to maintain a back and forth conversation through text. This study was a non-concurrent multiple baseline design across dyads. The study involved two texting interventions; the first focused on the steps needed to send a text and the second examined teaching texting content. The texting step intervention was taught using a total-task chaining procedure to teach each of the steps illustrated in the texting guidebook, which was designed specifically for the current study. The second intervention used a multiple exemplar approach (two conversation samples) that were interspersed across sessions and participants. Both interventions were implemented using the guidebooks combined with prompting. The participants were paired together, resulting in three dyads. In two of the dyads, both of the participants had an ASD diagnosis. The third dyad included one participant with ASD and one typically developing peer. Training sessions were conducted in a lounge setting at an after-school behavioral treatment center and in the children’s respecti…
author: Gilder, Jenna
keywords: Adolescents, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Children, Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), Conversational Speech, Texting, Developmental Psychology
date published: 2020-01-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:40:28Z
provider: Claremont Graduate University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Claremont Graduate University