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Social skills intervention for young children with visual impairment and additional disabilities

Tracy Pickard Evans, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to evaluate three different teaching approaches that might improve the social functioning of young children with visual impairment and additional disabilities. These three methods included: (1) the arrangement of ecological variables (child-selected play materials), (2) peer-mediated training procedures, and (3) teacher-directed prompting strategies to promote and reinforce social behaviors. Of the four children studied, two failed to show changes in verbal and physical interactive behaviors across baseline and peer-mediated conditions. However, these same two students demonstrated increases albeit highly variable, during the teacher-prompting phase. For the other two students, physical and verbal interactive behaviors increased during both peer and teacher prompting conditions when contrasted to baseline phases. Overall, these findings suggest that teacher-prompting procedures may be an effective teaching method to improve social skills of young children with vision impairment and additional disabilities.

Subject Area

Early childhood education|Special education|Educational sociology

Recommended Citation

Evans, Tracy Pickard, "Social skills intervention for young children with visual impairment and additional disabilities" (1994). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9420623.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9420623

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