Mary Jane Weiss – Teaching Social Skills that Matter: Targeting Crucial Skills with Effective Methods

1.0 Type II CE Credit

This presentation was filmed at the 2016 CCBS Autism Conference in Buellton, California

About the presentation:

Social skills are an elusive target of instruction, and often are the source of frustration for caregivers and clinicians. Our most modest gains occur in this realm, and many misconceptions exist about the pertinence of ABA to social skills instruction. Furthermore, social skills are often targeted through multi-element interventions, making it difficult to identify the procedures that do contribute to change. Compounding the confusion is the plethora of non evidence-based instructional methods that are used ubiquitously. In this talk, we will review the critically important social skills for different aged learners and we will highlight the outcomes that are most socially significant. In addition, we will review procedures that have been empirically validated, and we will discuss methods to assess the impact of different procedures in multi-element interventions. The important issues of generalization and independence will be discussed in the context of social skills instruction.