The Peer Buddy Study
The Peer Buddy Study is formally known as Exploring Predictors of Response to a Peer-Mediated Communication Intervention for Minimally Verbal Preschoolers with limited or no spoken language
Study Successes
Over the two-year project, the Peer Buddy Study worked with five preschools in five school districts, and completed the 8-week intervention with 24 children with limited or no spoken language and 47 peers.
Project accomplishments include:
Providing iPads for children to use with TouchChat voice output app and programmed comprehensive vocabularies with input by district autism consultants
Teaching 47 peers to Stay-Play-Talk with iPad, be responsive communication and play partners, and follow the steps with 92% accuracy on average
Preliminary results for 18 children (Cohorts 1-3) showed:
Stay-Play-Talk with iPad intervention significantly improved spontaneous communication and reciprocal child-peer exchanges in treatment (table play) and generalization settings (snack, free play)
In structured play, the rate of child communication doubled. Children with ASD took significantly more reciprocal turns with peers; and peers took significantly more reciprocal turns with children with ASD.
Classroom teachers reported that the social communication intervention led to progress communicating with other students in the classroom, was beneficial to their students and peers, and they would strongly recommend the program to other early educators (average rating across 20 educators response to 8 survey questions was 4.6 on a scale of 1 to 5)
Principal Investigator presented outcomes at a local and international conference for SLPs, early special educators, and related fields.
Goals of The Peer Buddy Study
The main goal of this project is to determine what role early social skills play in predicting children’s success following the Stay-Play-Talk with iPad intervention. Determining child behaviors that predict gains in communication with peers may shed light on why peer-mediated interventions are more effective for some children with ASD than others, and what is needed to optimize or individualize intervention strategies to meet the needs of a range of children. Early skills we believe may predict communication success with peers include social attention (such as paying attention to another person’s face) and interest in peers (such as orienting to what peers are doing and imitating peers).
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The second goal is to determine the influence of the assessment context on child outcomes by observing child behaviors in structured play and free play, and orientation to people or objects during an eye-tracking evaluation.
