Increasing Social Interactions Between High School Students with Intellectual Disabilities and Autism and General Education Peers

Background:  Effective social skills are critical to successful school performance, including classroom participation, academic engagement, and social interaction; yet, as core limitations, these skills often elude students with intellectual disabilities and autism. Observational studies conducted in high school settings indicate that programming to increase communication and social interaction among general education students and their peers with intellectual disabilities and autism rarely occurs and that intervention efforts to increase students’ active engagement in general education settings are similarly scarce.  

Objectives:  To increase social interactions between high school students with intellectual disabilities and autism and general education peers through the use of communication books.

Methods:  A multiple-baseline-design across settings and participants with a multiple-probe component was used to evaluate the effects of communication book use on participants’ social interactions. The study consisted of three experimental conditions: (a) baseline, (b) communication book training, and (c) communication book use, across which generalization data were collected daily. Follow-up data were collected four months following the termination of the communication book use condition.

Results:  Communication book use was associated with increases in conversational initiations and responses of five high school students identified with intellectual disabilities and autism with their general education peers across school settings. Following intervention, all participants indicated that they met their pre-intervention social goals of having more friends at school. In addition, general education conversational partners generally indicated that they enjoyed interacting with participants and they perceived that participants had increased their conversational skills.

Conclusions:  Conversational skills instruction is a first step toward increasing social interaction among students with intellectual disabilities and autism and their peers. By itself, however, instruction is not enough. Creating opportunities to interact socially with peers and providing peer support training must be part of any intervention to teach social skills to students with intellectual disabilities and autism.