Critical Review on how the teachers would interact with students with ASD

Critical Review on how the teachers would interact with students with ASD

Children with autism spectrum disease have considerable difficulties in social interaction and communication and, thus, for that reason, there is emphasis that has been placed on making sure that the students are taught social skills as part of their education. Children with ASD have been able to acquire crucial social skills through teaching strategies employed, interventions set up to enhance communication, having an interactive and accommodating physical environment that uses and comprises of technology-enhanced improvements. According to the researchers, there was evidence that technology, in particular, the use of smartphones, computers, and the use of robots in advanced classes enhanced the communication of the students with ASD.

The researchers stated the research problem as the impact that multiple technologies had on the imparting social interaction skills among children with ASD especially when the technologies were used side by side and what the effect of the teacher would be in such a learning environment (Kärnä, Dindar, & Hu, 2018). Primarily, the research sought to establish the how the various features of different technologies would affect the communication and social interaction between the co-participants, in this case, the teachers, and children with ASD and it also examines how the students would respond to their teachers in such learning environments.

The purpose of the study was to examine how the teachers would interact with students with ASD at four different locations that are technology-oriented learning environment that has multiple technologies in use (Kärnä, Dindar, & Hu, 2018). Furthermore, the significance of the study focused on determining how the teachers could exploit the use of multiple technologies in the learning environment to enhance communication with children with ASD.

The research posed five questions. First, what were the verbal instructions that the teachers used to communicate with the students with ASD? Secondly, what were the responses that students gave concerning the verbal instructions provided by the teachers? Thirdly, what was the relationship between the teachers’ education and the response the students with ASD provided? Fourthly, were there any significant differences between the teachers’ and students’ interactions while carrying out the lessons? Lastly, were there any significant differences between the Finnish and Chinese examples in terms of the children’s and teachers’ social interaction and communication while the engaged in the four working stations (Kärnä, Dindar, & Hu, 2018)?

The research methodology adopted an explorative research design because there was little to no evidence of how the use of multiple technologies within a learning environment influenced the communication between the teachers and autistic students. The sample of the study included both teachers and autistic students. There were three teachers and three students from Finland and four teachers and four students from China (Kärnä, Dindar, & Hu, 2018). In total, 14 participants comprised of 7 students and seven teachers. The students were boys aged between the ages of 6 and 12 (Kärnä, Dindar, & Hu, 2018).

The data collection took place in four different work stations that were both set in Finland and China for the teacher-student pairs. The data collection involved recording video of the interaction of the students and the teachers. The authors did not expressly state how they confirmed the validity of the research or how it could be established. However, the researchers used a coding system to analyze the recorded video interactions between the teachers and students with an initial qualitative focus to highlight communication or interactional phenomena (Kärnä, Dindar, & Hu, 2018). The instructional guidance was coded as either direct verbal communication (1) or questions posed to the students to guide them through the tasks (2).

On the other hand, the children’s responses were coded as either verbal response (1) or behavioral response (2). To reduce the biases of the coding of the data collected, the researchers calculated the inter-rater reliability (Kärnä, Dindar, & Hu, 2018). Thus, determining the reliability of the methodology and research.

The title of the research provides the reader with a short, but comprehensive details of what to expect in the research article and the abstract. It also provides a summary of the study from the introduction to the conclusion. It is clear and concise and provides an overall view of the paper as should an abstract do. Contrastingly, the introduction of the paper had a lot of information, and it delves more into the research problem, research question and its significance. The main shortcoming of the introduction is its lack of express indication of the research problem, purpose or relevance of the study. The reader has to extrapolate these aspects of the paper. The strength of the research’s study introduction is the information and discussion of the other articles and the need for this research as it introduces a new a perspective into the study of how best to enhance communication among students with ASD using different technologies.

The explorative research design gives the researchers a leeway of discovering a new perspective that has had limited to no exiting research done before and, thus, stands out as its main strength. However, the researchers do not indicate any ethical considerations that were done before the study and any validity tests that were performed. The results and discussion were very informative and answered all the research questions posed by the researchers. The researchers examined all the five questions and drew references from findings to establish a clear relationship between the teachers’ questions and the verbal response that the students offered. Furthermore, it was evident from the research that exploratory study that was developed and used by the researchers can be replicated in other research studies either to develop more advanced technology-enhanced learning environments or to further research in the field (Kärnä, Dindar, & Hu, 2018).