Use of an iPad Play Story to Increase Play Dialogue of Preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

An iPad play story was utilized to increase the pretend play skills of 4 preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders. The story utilized a series of video clips depicting toy figures producing scripted character dialogue, engaged in a pretend play vignette. A multiple baseline design across participants was utilized with play dialogue as the dependent variable. Three of the participants demonstrated increases in the target behavior with Nonoverlap of All Pairs analysis revealing moderate and strong effects across intervention phases. Effects were largely maintained during generalization opportunities with peers and during a 3-week follow-up condition.

Effectiveness of the Use of iPads to Enhance Communication and Learning for Students with Autism: A Systematic Review

“…Using an iPad with Proloquo2Go app as a speech-generating device helped students to discriminate between picture symbols [9] and increase correct matching [16]. iPad interventions also appeared to effectively increased levels of play dialogue when using an iPad play story [10]. The use of an iPad with systematic instruction and GoTalk Now app helped students to increase the number of independent correct responses on a shared story task analysis [15] and also to increase learning and independent levels [13].…”

“…students with autism; in total, 10 of 11 participants benefited from the intervention. Concurrently, the results of the studies focused on academic skills were overwhelmingly positive with just two studies [9,10] reporting no effect for one participant in each of the two studies. This suggests that the use of iPads as educational and instructional tools for engagement in literacy and math for academic purposes appears to provide effective interventions for children and adolescents with autism; in total, 27 of 29 participants benefited from the intervention.…”

“…One study included two participants with autism, who had been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome (AS) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) [7] and one participant with AS only [11]. Two studies included three participants with autism and a pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified [10,11]. Two studies included three participants with autism and mild and moderate intellectual disabilities [4,18].…”

“…Finally, three studies focused on teaching academic engagement skills in terms of increasing academic responding by using an iPad with video-self modeling [4], and increasing play dialogue (PD) by using an iPad with Keynote application [10]. In addition, [11] defined academic engagement as "looking at the assignment, responding to questions verbally or physically (by writing, typing, or selecting on a computer) or engaging in demand-related conversation" (p. 512).…”

“…In the category of math, the first differentiation of dependent variables was to identify, write, and comprehend the quantity of numbers from 1 -7 [6], and independent comparisons of grocery item shopping [18], independently completing math tasks on assessments [13], the presence of noncompliant behaviors during assessment [13], and, finally, the level of teacher prompting during the assessment [13]. The second category related to engagement in literacy and math was literacy regarding checking spelling [7], the number of play dialogue utterances [10], independent correct responses on story analysis [15], unprompted correct responses to listening and comprehension questions [15]. Enhanced communication skills were also examined by studies targeting AAC users [8,9,16,14,15,17,20].…”