Children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASD) typically exhibit a lack of social reciprocity skills. They often struggle to maintain conversations, especially with topics of little or no interest to them, and to create meaningful relationships. By giving compliments to others, children with ASD have a means by which to show approval for issues of interest to others. Video modeling has been shown to be effective in teaching social behaviors, particularly when it is followed by additional practice, prompts, and role playing. This study, involving two experiments, focused on teaching compliment-giving responses and initiations through video modeling with embedded, explicit rules for giving compliments in the place of additional procedures following video viewing. A multiple-baseline design across participants revealed that video modeling with explicit rules served to produce and maintain compliments of the "response" type. Video modeling with the addition of contrived reinforcement contingencies served to produce compliment-giving initiations in the presence of a teacher who monitored the children's behavior. The results of Experiment 2 showed that the inclusion of self-management strategies increased the children's independence in the monitoring of their compliment-giving initiations. Experimental results pointed to the use of self-management as a means by which to produce social initiations when video modeling alone fails.

This study provides evidence that use of therapy balls for students with ADHD may facilitate in-seat behavior and legible word productivity.

We examined the opinions of experts in the field of moderate to severe disabilities on useful practices for inclusive education across nine categories of practices: Promoting inclusive values in the school; collaboration between general and special educators; collaboration between educators and related service providers; family involvement; choosing and planning what to teach; scheduling, coordinating, and delivering inclusive services within the school; assessing and reporting student progress on an ongoing basis; instructional strategies; and supporting students with challenging behavior. An examination of emergent themes within each category yielded a rich description of the depth and breadth of practices that are perceived by these experts as useful in promoting and sustaining successful school inclusion. Importantly, many of the identified practices require some level of educational service restructuring, including redefining the roles and functions of special education teachers, related services personnel, and classroom teachers. We also found that our sample of experts relied on sources of information other than empirical research in the development of their stores of wisdom on useful practices. Although preliminary in nature, our study contributes to the growing body of literature on inclusive education. It describes a range of practices perceived by a sample of experts to be associated with successful school inclusion. It also identifies a number of important themes that can inform future research in this area.

Occupational therapy intervention involving word processing with word prediction improves the legibility and spelling of written assignments completed by some children with learning disabilities and handwriting difficulties. It is important to evaluate each child individually and provide training and ongoing support for technology use.

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