• Circle of Friends
• Ecological Assessment as a Tool for Teaching Social Skills
• Hidden Curriculum
• Peer-Mediated Instruction and Interventions
• Person Centered Planning
• SOCCSS
• Social Stories

Ecological Assessment as a Tool for Teaching Social Skills: Introduction

The greatest area of difficulty for children with ASD is the social realm. Even individuals who are able to use and understand language may struggle with social communication. Problems with social communication may include the inability to use eye gaze in a meaningful way, difficulty using or responding to gestures, difficulty using or reading facial expressions and body language, preoccupation with the topic rather than the process of conversation, and difficulty understanding the communication partner’s perceptions, feelings and needs.

If you ask most adults how they learned to multiply, they can describe the process. If you ask them how they learned to nod or say “uh-huh” when someone is speaking, most would say they “just knew.” Do you remember someone teaching you what it meant if they crossed their arms tightly over their chest and paired it with an expression that looked like they just bit into a lemon? Probably not. This is what makes teaching social skills so difficult. We don’t know how we learned to interpret reactions and expressions; the what to do, or when to do it, or how to vary it—we just did it. Ecological assessment using observations of how children without disabilities perform an activity in a given environment is a tool that can help gather information about what skills a child with ASD needs to learn to be successful in a specific social situation.

Lecture Content

• What is an ecological assessment?
• Purpose of an ecological assessment
• How to complete an ecological assessment?
• What do you do with the information you collect
• Key points to consider in planning social skills instruction