Web-based Assessment of Social-Emotional Skills in School-Aged Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
SELweb is a quick, reliable web game that spots social-emotional skill gaps in elementary students with autism.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Dudley et al. (2019) tested a new web game called SELweb. Kids with autism aged 6-10 played short tasks on a tablet. The tasks checked theory of mind, emotion recognition, social problem solving, and self-control.
The team looked at whether the game was easy to use, gave steady scores, and truly measured social skills.
What they found
SELweb worked well. It was quick, kids could use it alone, and scores were reliable.
The game showed the autism group was weaker in theory of mind, social problem solving, and self-control, but not in emotion recognition.
How this fits with other research
Dekker et al. (2016) also created a new social-skills tool. They watched kids in real recess play and found good rater agreement. Both studies prove we can measure social skills in more than one way: web tasks or live observation.
Wang et al. (2011) and Emerson et al. (2013) checked older paper checklists like SSRS, PKBS, and SRS in preschoolers. Those tools work, but parents or teachers fill them out and they may miss small changes after teaching. SELweb gives direct child data and can be re-done each month without extra staff.
Žic Ralić et al. (2025) asked parents to rate social-emotional skills. Parents saw no big gap between autism only and ID only, but the lowest scores came from kids with both autism and ID. SELweb’s computer scoring removes parent point-of-view bias and can flag the same mixed-group weakness.
Why it matters
You now have a child-friendly, web-based screener that takes 15 minutes and needs no trained observer. Use SELweb at intake or every nine weeks to pick exact social targets, show parents clear graphs, and track small gains that paper rating scales often miss.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Try the SELweb emotion and theory-of-mind modules with one client, then match the lowest subdomain to your next teaching target.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Few tools are available to comprehensively describe the unique social-emotional skill profiles of youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The present study describes the usability, reliability, and validity of SELweb, a normed, web-based assessment designed to measure four core social-emotional domains, when used to measure these skills in a sample of 57 well-characterized youth with ASD (ages 6-10 years with IQ ≥ 80). SELweb measures facial emotion recognition, theory of mind, social problem solving, and self-control. SELweb was well tolerated and yielded scores with reliabilities comparable to those found in normative samples. SELweb scores showed good evidence of convergent and discriminant validity for three of the four skills it was designed to assess. Mean deficits were found for theory of mind, social problem solving, and self-control, whereas no mean deficits were found for emotion recognition. Individual profiles varied considerably, suggesting the sensitivity of SELweb to the within- and between-person individual differences among youth with ASD. Findings support the usefulness and accessibility of SELweb as a tool for measuring complex social-emotional skill profiles in youth with ASD. Autism Res 2019, 12: 1260-1271. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: No single, simple, high-quality test exists that measures multiple social thinking skills directly in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The present study suggests that SELweb, a web-based assessment system, is an effective and valid way to measure how children with ASD think about and understand social and emotional information, and is able to capture strengths and weaknesses experienced by children with ASD.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2019 · doi:10.1002/aur.2123