Enhancing Perspective-Taking Skills in Children with Autism

Introduction

The article by Welsh et al. (2019) researches the process of teaching perspective-taking component skills to children with autism. The researchers obtained an acceptable level of variability, and graphs were utilized to demonstrate participant progress. Nevertheless, the number of participants was too small to make a fundamental conclusion, so the recommendation is to increase the number of experiment members. An accurate analysis of teaching children with autism was conducted by the researchers, who were able to demonstrate a functional relationship between study participants.

Main body

An experimental design was used, and three participants were used to evaluate the efficiency of the intervention. This design included creating external and social stimuli for these people to interact. During the subsequent trials, the participant’s ability to interact with others and the environment increased (Welsh et al., 2018). The experimental design was conducted with the help of scientific theories or strategies on the professional level and positively influenced participants’ responses. For instance, one participant could sense from 40% to 60% of other people sensing, and the other participant’s result was from 20%-50% (Welsh et al., 2018). Therefore, the experimental design was professionally used and increased participants’ ability to sense stimuli.

The functional relationship was demonstrated due to increasing sensitivity among participants, but the number of members was too small, to widely implement the findings of this research. The relationship was shown in how participants responded to the stimuli with the help of different senses. During the trial, members needed to define the items to make the process more effective and different distractors were used (Welsh et al., 2018). Participants learned how to define different items by sensing them and not guessing. However, the selection of members was too small to fully demonstrate the effectiveness of strategies, so improvement in testing this theory among a total number of participants is needed. Hence, the functional relationship was shown, but the recommendation is to increase the number of participants.

Conclusion

All in all, perspective-taking component skills help teach children with autism to sense their surroundings. The article used experimental design and a professional approach to the research. The experimental design included the usage of graphs and tables to demonstrate participants’ progress. In addition, the functional relationship may be seen in participants’ responses. To improve the current study design, it can be proposed to focus on intervention effectiveness and introduce follow-up assessments to validate the results obtained.

References

Welsh, F., Najdowski, A. C., Strauss, D., Gallegos, L., & Fullen, J. A. (2019). Teaching a perspective‐taking component skill to children with autism in the natural environment. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 52(2), 439-450.