ESTABLISHING THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF APPLYING GRAY’S SENTENCE RATIO AS A COMPONENT IN A 10-STEP SOCIAL STORIES INTERVENTION MODEL, TEACHING SOCIAL SKILLS TO STUDENTS WITH ASD
Open Access
- Author:
- Tarnai, Balazs
- Graduate Program:
- Special Education
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- December 08, 2008
- Committee Members:
- Pamela S Wolfe, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Pamela S Wolfe, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Frank R Rusch, Committee Member
David Lee, Committee Member
Kathryn D R Drager, Committee Member - Keywords:
- sentence ratio
autism
ASD
social skills
Social Stories - Abstract:
- Literature on Social Stories refers to the method as a “popular trend” in the instruction of students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and describes potential benefits but also cautions that there is little empirical evidence for their effectiveness. Reviews of the literature report variable effects, along with inconsistencies in Social Story structure, research design, and variation across participants and behaviors. In a recent study (Tarnai, Wolfe, & Rusch, under review), a 10-step approach to constructing and evaluating Social Stories for students with ASD was developed to guide procedural fidelity of Social Stories implementations. Researchers have called for further investigations to determine the components of Social Stories intervention packages that contribute to their efficacy. One claim of Gray, the originator of the method is that Social Stories describe rather than direct behavior, which differentiates them from a mere task analysis chain. To create a contextual-descriptive framework, Gray has introduced a ratio of sentence types to be used in a Social Story. The present study seeks to investigate if, as Gray maintained, her recommended sentence ratio is an essential component of Social Stories in an instructional situation (remote from actual skill practice) for which they were designed. For this purpose, a 10-Step Social Stories intervention model using Gray’s sentence ratio (i.e., a ‘contextual’ Social Story), and a similarly composed method omitting Gray’s sentence ratio (i.e., a ‘directive’ Social Story), was compared in teaching social skills to students with ASD. Dependent measures evaluated teaching efficiency by student outcome indicators such as percentage of criterion attained (pre-defined task analysis steps); and number of necessary trials to criterion. Contextual Social Stories consistently yielded fewer trials to criterion and maintained stable performance at criterion. Results suggest the relative importance of applying Gray’s sentence ratio as a component in a Social Stories intervention package. This finding is consistent with implications from other special education research studies that suggest that descriptive social-contextual information be added to instruction, beyond purely teaching the performance of a target task.