Social competence intervention for youth with Asperger Syndrome and high-functioning autism: an initial investigation.

Poppes et al. (2010) ran a 27-student Social Competence Intervention group for middle-schoolers with Asperger or high-functioning autism.

They met after school for lessons on reading faces, taking others’ views, and planning social steps.

Parents and testers rated kids before and after the ten-week course.

Parents saw clear gains in everyday social skills and flexibility.

Direct tests showed students read facial expressions better, understood others’ thoughts, and solved social problems faster.

All measures moved in the positive direction with no extra training hours.

Wuang et al. (2012) later repeated the same lessons with younger kids and saw the same kind of gains, showing the idea works across ages.

Pitchford et al. (2019) used a tougher design — a randomized trial — and got even stronger conversation improvements, so the field now expects control groups.

Saré et al. (2020) pushed the idea further by teaching job-place social skills to adults and still saw good outcomes, proving social training keeps paying off.

You can borrow the SCI lesson plan today: show a face card, ask what the person might feel, then role-play the next social step.

Because later studies kept the gains with tighter methods, you can trust that explicit face-and-mind lessons work for most verbal students on the spectrum.