The demand for effective social skills interventions for children with autism spectrum disorders is a pertinent issue for school-based professionals. One approach to increase appropriate social skills is to involve peer support by training a few socially competent children to positively interact with a student with an ASD. Potentially, training larger groups of children could result in increasing the number of different peers who would actively support positive interactions with their classmates with ASD. Thus, the present study investigated the effect of a class-wide peer-training strategy on the percentage of positive social interaction and number of peer contacts for three elementary students with autism spectrum disorders. All peers in the three different classrooms received a brief lesson on respecting differences in others and how to support all classmates during classroom and recess activities. Next, each class was taught how to support other students in the class by modeling, role playing, and didactic instruction. This training specifically targeted preferred recess activities and social skills goals of the student with an ASD. After training, peers received a verbal prompt to use skills before a recess period, implemented the procedures in the absence of direct supervision during recess, and participated for a chance to earn points towards a class-wide reward for participating in positive interactions with the student with an ASD. A multiple baseline across the three classrooms showed replicated positive effects of the intervention relative to a prior baseline condition. Results showed that the class-wide respect and social support skills training paired with a contingent reward contingency increased the level of positive social interactions as well as the number of peer contacts for all three students with autism spectrum disorders.

Difficulty with many aspects of social interactions is a defining characteristic of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Video modeling (VM) has successfully improved a range of social skills for individuals with ASD in previous studies, but most often with simple social skills with young children. The current study used VMs scripted and recorded by peers to improve complex conversation and social gestures by a young adult with ASD. A multiple-probe, across-behaviors design found mixed evidence of experimental control of VM on the social behaviors of the individual with ASD, although all behaviors increased from baseline and generalized to other settings and conversants. Peer comparison data from the conversation partner suggest that the VM may have served to prompt the peer to guide and extend conversation as modeled in the VMs and that the conversation skills of the peer also improved throughout the study. Implications of the important role peers may play to enhance VM and improve social skills are explored.

Conflict is inevitable in school and in life. Many children lack skills necessary to resolve daily conflicts constructively. Without knowledge of positive ways to manage conflicts, violence may result. Limited research suggests that involvement in a peer mediation program may have a positive influence on children. This study assessed effects peer mediation training and mediation experience had on student mediators. The pretest-posttest, control-group, and quasi-experimental study investigated the effects of a year long peer mediation program implemented in a suburban elementary school.

Qatar’s education system has recently been subjected to a process of deep structural reform. One of the beliefs which underpins this reform is the assumption that learner-centred pedagogy is more effective than traditional teacher-centred pedagogy. However, there is limited empirical evidence from a Qatari classroom context regarding the effectiveness of using learner-centred pedagogies. This lack of empirical evidence extends to the teaching of English as a foreign language. This study employed Vygotskian sociocultural theory as a lens to investigate the effects of working collaboratively on learners’ longer-term performance of two grammatical structures, the simple past passive and the present continuous passive, as well as the cognitive processes involved. Interventionist dynamic assessment was used to quantify the linguistic performance of male Arabic undergraduate EFL learners (N = 52) three times (pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest) over a 12-week period. In-between the pretest and the posttest, six form-focused treatment tasks were administered. The experimental group (n = 20) completed the treatment tasks collaboratively; the comparison group (n = 16) completed the treatment tasks individually; and the control group (n = 16) did not complete the treatment tasks. In addition, the genetic method was employed to trace the linguistic development of four participants in the experimental group. These four participants were audio-recorded as they collaboratively completed each treatment session. Mood’s median test (Mood, 1954) found a pretest to posttest statistically significant difference (M = 7.70, df = 1, p = 0.01) between the performances of the experimental and control groups for the structure of the simple past passive which is moderate to large in size (Cramér’s V = 0.46). However for both target structures, no statistically significant difference was found between the experimental group and the comparison group, suggesting that the treatment condition of working collaboratively was not more effective in promoting learners’ linguistic development than the treatment condition of working individually. Additionally, the descriptive statistics revealed high levels of individual variation. Of the four participants who were audio-recorded, the journey of one learner is presented. This data was analysed using a microgenetic approach with LREs (Swain and Lapkin, 1995, 1998, 2002) as the unit of analysis. The microgenetic analysis shows how working collaboratively provides learners with access to a shared cognitive space. Within this space, they can employ language as a cognitive tool to access other-regulation from their peers and deploy their own self-regulatory strategies. The experience of an individual was explored within the context of the linguistic gains made by the collective to whom he belongs. Thus, even though the statistical analysis of the results suggests that working collaboratively is not more effective in facilitating learners’ linguistic development than working individually, the process of language learning has been connected to the outcome of language learning through the results of the descriptive statistics and the microgenetic analysis. This study contributes to a better understanding of: the types of pedagogies that may be effective in a Qatari undergraduate context, why collaborative learning can be effective, how knowledge which is initially social can take on a psychological function, and how the Vygotskian sociocultural methodologies of the genetic method and dynamic assessment can be integrated into an SLA design.

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Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Psychology, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 29-34).

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The doctoral dissertation deals with the description and analysis of healthy self-esteem in terms of its formation; influences that enter into the process of formation and possibilities of the healthy self-esteem development in the school environment with regard to social, cultural and religious context in which the student lives. The theoretical part of the thesis on the basis of literature compiled the most fundamental assumptions and circumstances that largely affect pupil's confidence and contribute to its development in a positive sense. Attention is paid to themes theoretical definition of the concept of self and internal influences that act on the formation of self-esteem. Family, school and peer group are presented as a major social and cultural external influences, together with a religious context influencing the formation of self-esteem. The performance is a phenomenological theory of Chris Mruk shows the issue of confidence in more complex form. The theoretical part is concluded by outlining the possibilities for the development of healthy self-esteem in school through the pupil )including peer mediation) and analysis of some international research which raises questions for a Czech context. The aim of the research is to determine whether and to what extent has felt self-esteem,...