Regardless of cognitive abilities and severity of symptoms, all individuals diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience significant challenges regarding the development of social and emotional skills. Circumventing such challenges often require special and intensive instruction and support. Computer-Based Instruction (CBI) represents a potential instructional method for teaching social and emotional skills to individuals diagnosed with ASD. Further, CBI can be tailored to meet the unique learning needs of individuals with ASD. Given the decent number of studies have been conducted to improve social and emotional skills in moderately large number of individuals with ASD, a systematic review of research is warranted.
Objectives:
The purpose of this review is to provide a systematic analysis of studies involving the use of CBI to teach social and / or emotional skills to individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This review has three main aims: a) to evaluate the evidence-base regarding CBI, b) to inform and guide practitioners interested in using CBI, and c) to stimulate and guide future research aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of CBI for development of social and emotional skills in individuals with ASD.
Methods:
Systematic search of four comprehensive databases, along with hand searches of major, relevant journals, were conducted to find peer-reviewed intervention studies that were published between 1990 and 2010. This review summarizes, synthesizes, and evaluates intervention outcomes, appraises the certainty of evidence, and describes software and system requirements for each included study.
Results:
The systematic search yielded 11 studies (12 experiments) involving the use of CBI to teach social and emotional skills to a total of 269 participants diagnosed with ASD. Studies that measured the effectiveness of CBI on social skill relevant repertoires (e.g., social competence, social interaction, spontaneous social greetings) reported consistently positive outcomes. However studies that measured the effectiveness of CBI on facial processing skills reported inconsistent outcomes within and across studies. Finally, measures related to effectiveness of CBI on teaching false-belief tasks were inconclusive. Given the heterogeneity of the participants and the wide variety of social and emotional skills targeted for instruction, it is not possible from the existing literature to determine the variables most likely to be associated with effective CBI.
Conclusions:
Experimental measures developed by study authors yielded positive results and larger effect sizes more often than standardized norm-referenced measures. Only three studies reported anecdotal evidence of in-vitro generalization and none of the studies have demonstrated the generalization of acquired skill to everyday life. Outcomes obtained from two studies suggest that the magnitude of improvement in emotion recognition is positively correlated with the number of times the program was used. Finally, possible directions for future research will be proposed in terms of using more rigorous standardized measures, using CBI in conjunction either with a group activity or under the guidance of an adult tutor, and discovering the time course for the plasticity of emotion recognition.
See more of: Treatments: A: Social Skills; School, Teachers
See more of: Prevalence, Risk factors & Intervention