<p class="apa">The present study sought to examine parents’ perceptions of early interventions and related services for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Saudi Arabia. In this study a survey was distributed to a sample of 80 parents with children who have ASD. Parents also were asked open-ended questions to enable them to provide suggestions. The findings indicate that parents have varying perceptions of early interventions and related services. However, they seem to agree that these services are important in assisting their children. Accordingly, parents have suggested that the government needs to increase these services by providing more centers for children with ASD in Saudi Arabia, providing more specialists to deal with children with ASD, promoting inclusion in regular schools and providing more information on early intervention.</p>

A systematic of literature was carried out on peer-reviewed journals published from 2000 to 2015 to help in determining the best strategy of evidence-based practice that can be applied in teaching literacy skills among students with multiple disabilities. A total of 12 studies were reviewed, some of which included science and mathematics skills alongside literacy skills. The articles were evaluated according to the methodological processes used in carrying out the studies. Generally, all the strategies were found to be evidence based practices, which can be used to teach students with multiple disabilities. The systematic instruction and self-directed learning emerged as the most popular peer teaching and technology. Due to lack of enough studies that majored specifically on the students who suffered from more than one type of disability, other forms of severe disabilities like autism and intellectual disability, which are considered under the umbrella of multiple disabilities, were included in the systematic review. Additionally, in the process of defining certain target responses to demonstrate learning, with discrete responses being common, the type of feedback and systematic prompting that was commonly used was time delay, while stimulus fading was the least used component. One-to-one instruction and massed trials were the most commonly used formats for teaching. Though this is not a proof that systematic instruction is the best strategy, it is a suggestion that it is applicable in several situations and preferred by many researchers. Other strategies have also equally given positive responses and are thus effective in teaching literacy among students with multiple disabilities.

Cultural Intelligence (CI) refers to the motivation and ability to understand and deal with cultural differences. As such, it is assumed to play a role in the effectiveness of social contact and communication between people from different cultures. Given its relevance to international relations, it is imperative to test which individual and group factors are associated with CI. Therefore, in the present study we examine cross-cultural and gender differences in CI. In one of their classes at their university, students ( N = 829) from Egypt and Saudi Arabia completed a multidimensional measure of CI. The results showed an interesting pattern of interactions between country and gender, which indicated that Egyptian men did not significantly differ from co-national women, but Saudi men scored significantly lower than women. We suggest that the different patterns of results in the two countries may partly arise from different levels of exposure to different cultures and partly from subtle differences in the constitution of the samples. Knowledge of individual and group differences in cultural intelligence may potentially contribute to explaining differential levels of success in individuals or countries in dealing with cultural differences.

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