Improving Social Communication in Autistic Adolescents Through a Clinic-Home-School Collaboration
A short clinic-home-school package lifts social talk in verbal autistic teens and keeps the gains.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Koegel and colleagues tested a six-to-seven-week social communication package for verbal autistic teens.
The team ran the program in clinic, home, and school at the same time.
They used a multiple-baseline design across participants to see if skills grew.
What they found
Every teen showed better social communication that lasted after the sessions ended.
Parents, teachers, and the teens themselves all said they liked the program.
How this fits with other research
The new package builds on older work. Bailey (1984) and Bauminger (2002) also taught social skills to verbal autistic youth and saw gains, but they met only in clinic or school and ran longer.
Dudley et al. (2019) reviewed school-only programs for younger kids and warned they are hard to run without researchers. Koegel et al. (2024) answers that worry by adding short parent coaching and teacher tips so the school does not carry the whole load.
Capio et al. (2013) looks like a clash: parent coaching helped toddlers’ social play yet language scores stayed flat. The teens in Koegel’s study already had words, so the goal was conversation, not vocabulary. Same tool—parent coaching—different age, different target, no real conflict.
Why it matters
You can copy this three-zone plan: one clinic lesson, one home practice, one school cue each week. It fits a lunch period or advisory slot and needs no extra staff once you train the adults. Try it with your next verbal teen who stays quiet at break.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Differences in social communication are common in highly verbal autistic adolescents and can interfere with development of friendships as well as lead to other co-occurring challenges. The purpose of this initial study was to assess whether targeted areas of social communication would improve following the implementation of a manualized social communication package with parent participation and school coordination. Autistic adolescents who demonstrated challenges with social communication participated in this study in the context of a rigorous concurrent multiple baseline experimental design. Weekly intervention targeting social communication was implemented over a period of six to seven weeks (depending on preintervention scores). Additionally, parents and participants completed standardized assessments of anxiety and depression and a post-intervention questionnaire was administered to assess their satisfaction with the intervention. This study demonstrated that social communication could be improved with a short-term intervention program with parent and school participation. All participants showed improvements in social communication, which was maintained at follow-up. Also, all participants and their parents reported high satisfaction with the program. These findings corroborate a growing literature base suggesting that support in the area of social communication is needed and can benefit autistic adolescents.
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2024 · doi:10.1007/s10803-024-06545-6