INCREASING PARTICIPATION IN THE CLASSROOM FOR CHILDREN WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS

Active participation is as essential a skill to children with autism as it is for children without autism, as children are expected to engage in these skills both in and outside the classroom. Without participation skills, children are at a disadvantage when it comes to school and other settings, such as extracurricular activities and the workforce. Recent research has shown that there are interventions available that aim to improve the social skills of children in the home and in the school. These interventions can be delivered in varying forms with the primary caregiver as the interventionist, the specialist as the interventionist, and naturalistic interventions. The purpose of this study was to investigate one of the naturalistic interventions, the Competent Learner Model, and determine its effects on the participation and social skills of students with autism. Three middle school male students diagnosed with autism from a rural northeast middle school participated in the study. They were assessed using the Competent Learner Repertoire Assessments of the Competent Learner Model and the adaptive measures of the Vineland-II and ABAS-II. The results showed improvement for one of the three students and little to no improvement for the other two students.

The Impact of Gender and Pedagogy on the Development of Self-Regulated Learning Strategies in Undergraduate Engineering Classrooms

The purpose of this paper is to examine ways in which pedagogy and gender of instructor impact the development of self-regulated learning strategies as assessed by the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) in male and female undergraduate engineering students. Pedagogy was operationalized as two general formats: lecture plus active learning techniques or problem-base/project-based learning. One hundred seventy-six students from four universities participated in the study. Within-group analyses found significant differences with regard to pedagogy, instructors’ gender, and student gender on the learning strategies and motivation subscales as operationalized by the MSLQ. Male and females students reported significant post-test differences with regard to the gender of instructor and the style of pedagogy. The results of this study showed a pattern where more positive responses for students of both genders were found with the same-gendered instructor. The results also suggested that male students responded more positively to project and problem-based courses with changes evidenced in motivation strategies and resource management. Female students showed decreases in resource management in these two types of courses. Further, female students reported increases in the lecture with active learning courses.