The acquisition of peer-related social competence is very important task for children in their early development. Most children learn the skills to interact with peers positively in preschool years. But the handicapped children were turned out not to ...
The acquisition of peer-related social competence is very important task for children in their early development. Most children learn the skills to interact with peers positively in preschool years. But the handicapped children were turned out not to have the basic interaction skills to participate in positive peer interaction, and to show the difference in peer interaction types qualitively and quantitively with the their peers.
If the handicapped children didnt have the opportunity to learn the social skills from their peers in early developmental years, and even though integrated, if they were to live in the socially separate and refused settings, they were reported to have the adaptive problems in the vocation and the community living in adult years. And peer-related social skills influenced the other developmental areas, and gave the opportunity of natural learning, especially the active and positive peer interaction proved to affect cognition, language and communication, and more advanced social interaction skills. Therefore, the early social interaction interventions supporting the handicapped child in the integrated settings were considered very important.
Based on these importances, this study was planned and implemented. The first propose of this study was to implement the intervention which could be more intensive and effective in initiating social behaviors of peers and children with developmental disabilities, originating the social interaction, producing the higher rates of the generalization and the maintenance, and making the children participating the ongoing class activities. To accomplish these purposes, the multiple peers-mediated intervention dispersed into the class activities was implemented as followed: First, three to four peer-mediators were trained at the beginning of intervention. Second, each peer-mediator interacted with target handicapped child in three intervention activities successively from the first time. Third, not only for the three activities(snack, free-choice 1 and 2), but also for control activity(art and manipulation) to know the generalization effects of the intervention, the frequency of social behaviors was measured during the intervention and the maintenance phase. Additionally the rate of participation which meant the interaction between child and environment, and the appropriate inclusion to ongoing activities in the integrated class was measured to ensure the effect of intervention.
The second purpose of this study was to evaluate the changes of childs social behaviors objectively, and to test the social validity of the changes by the important social agents affected by the child. So the performance-based social competence(PASC) was measured which included the peer acceptance and teacher rating of social interaction.
The multiple peers-mediated intervention dispersed into the class activities was implemented with multiple-baseline design across the 3 participants by 10 peer-mediators, for 16 weeks in the integrated community-based child center. And the pre and the post sociometrics to know the peer acceptance were tested for 88 participants, 44 peers-experimental group consisted of target subjects peers, and for 44 peers matched control group. The pre and the post teacher rating of social interaction were done by 30 teachers, the 15 teachers of experimental group and the 15 teachers matched control group.
The results from this study were summarized as followed:
1. The multiple peers-mediated intervention demonstrated the effects in social behaviors, especially social interaction between handicapped children and their peers, which trained and prompted the multiple peers to initiate social interaction in the various dispersed activities.
2. The intervention had an effect on the generalization setting (control activity) from the beginning to the maintenance phase.
3. The intervention increased the rate of participation to the ongoing-class activities.
4. The intervention influenced the positive effects on the peer acceptance of the handicapped children by the target childrens improvement in the appropriateness and the functional level.
5. The intervention made the positive impact on the social interaction rating of teachers for the handicapped children.
Based on these results, not only the social interaction with peers and the participation to class activities, but also intervention included with the more comprehensive outcomes and activities, and the more objective assessment system must be developed in the futere.