The diversity of children within the preschool classroom is dramatically changing as children with autism spectrum disorder are increasingly included within it. To engage in the benefits of inclusion, social skills are needed. Yet, children with autism commonly experience difficulties in this area. Extant literature indicates that social skills…

Sexuality education is an essential part of a comprehensive curriculum for individuals with disabilities as emerging adults. Lack of socio-sexuality education for individuals with disabilities has been linked to limited resources and training for teachers/personnel, and restrictive attitudes. The present study examined the effectiveness of the…

This study contributes to existing research on study abroad programming by exploring how short-term study abroad experiences develop college students' global citizenship skills. Offering a unique qualitative approach focused on holistic global perspective development through students' visual and personal narratives, this study investigates how…

Social narratives, or story-based interventions, are defined as stories that describe social situations, appropriate social behaviors to display, and when to display the specified behaviors. Social narratives are a commonly implemented and empirically evaluated procedure used to improve social behavior and decrease the probability of aberrant…

People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience impairments in social communication, which may affect their ability to develop social skills necessary for successful employment. It is unclear which types of interventions have been used to teach specific work-related social skills to people with ASD and what the overall effectiveness of those…

We used a cluster-randomized controlled trial to examine the impacts of a technology- and game-based social-emotional program, the "Adventures Aboard the S.S. GRIN" ("Adventures"), on students' social skills development. Eighty-eight third-grade classrooms (N = 1645 third-grade students) across four California public school…

Memes within animated graphical interchange formats (GIFs) are developed and shared by Internet users to communicate cultural ideas, symbols, or practices for a wide global audience. Among the billions of GIFs shared internationally, some portray scientists engaged in scientific work. Media and science education scholarship alike have evidenced…

Individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) remain underrepresented in many core classes such as mathematics and science due to common characteristics that affect social interactions, behaviors, learning abilities, and communication. According to the DSM-5-TR (2013), a deficit in social communication, social reciprocity, and…

Learning pragmatics involves learning linguistic forms and their communicative functions as well as the context where the form-function relationships are realized. Given its socially grounded, context-sensitive nature, pragmatics may be best learned in a technology-enhanced environment that provides direct access to contextualized communicative…

In the context of Social Stories™, we compared visual attention to social scenes using BoardMaker™ versus photographic stimuli among typically developing (TD) children and age-matched children with ASD. For visual attention, the dependent measures were the number of fixations and fixation time to eye, mouth, and 'other' (background) areas of…

Leisure activities are important in assisting individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to build relationships, learn to behave socially appropriately, and acquire new interests--competences that assist in cultivating positive self-consciousness (Specht et al., 2002; Womack et al., 2011). Statistics indicate that 2.3% of 8-year-old children…

Using a multiple probe design across peer buddy-target child dyads, we evaluated the effects of an intervention package (i.e., brief training, system of least prompts, visual supports) on peer buddies' use of stay-play-talk (SPT) with their classmates who were socially isolated (target children). All six peer buddies increased their use of SPT…

The implementation of social and emotional learning (SEL) related tools and strategies is becoming widely used in classrooms within the United States to promote student success. However, teachers may not feel prepared or knowledgeable about the topic which leads to apprehension regarding implementation. It is imperative for educators to understand…

The purpose of research is to analyse how digital and non-digital learning media can facilitate the development of life skills for fifth-grade elementary school students after the COVID-19 pandemic. This case-study research involved two elementary school teachers, one principal and one school supervisor in the Probolinggo district, East Java,…

The purpose of the study was to compare the effectiveness and efficiency of animated and non-animated mobile social story maps using the mobile learning environment that the authors developed. An application using the story map method based on social stories was developed. Mobile social story map was presented with animated and non-animated…