Erica Grindinger
Special Education Intensive Resource
UNIQUE LEARNERS
Special Education Professional Portfolio
Social Skills
Social Skills as Learned Behaviors
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Social skills are not something that you are born with, they are learned others.
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Children watch the adults that they are with most often (parents, caregivers, teachers, etc.) and will often try to imitate how they act in social interactions. This is the foundation of social skill understanding and learning.
Neurotypical individuals learn basic social skills quickly and easily.
Impairment in social functioning is a central feature of ASD. Typical social skill deficits include: initiating interactions, responding to the initiations of others, maintaining eye contact, sharing enjoyment, reading the non-verbal cues of others, and taking another person's perspective.
For many learners with ASD, social interaction does not come as naturally for them because their brains process social information differently. Individuals with ASD can learn social skills, it just takes finding the best way to teach them.
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Social Skills and Academic Competence
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Social skills and academic competence influenced each other consistently over-time, a pattern where academic competence casually influenced social competence, which in turn casually influenced academic competence.
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Research shows a connection between social interaction and academic achievement in relation to: understanding curriculum constructs, analytical skills, communication and problem-solving skills.
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Social interaction is a vital component of a functional curriculum for learners with ASD. A functional curriculum is one that focuses on skills that build independence, but those skills include functional academics.
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Social Disconnect​
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People with autism may appear neither to be interested in nor able to “read” the social world. It is thought individuals with ASD are blinded to complicated and emotionally heavy, give and takes of social interactions.​
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Individuals with ASD often want "friends" but do not know how to go about making them or how to maintain the relationship. For a lot of individuals with ASD, social acceptance is related to the development of self-esteem and self-competence.
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Due to computers and the internet, people can get away with less human interaction than at any time in history. However, humans still make the majority of non-routine decisions in our lives. Individuals make those decisions based on the social behaviors of the person with whom they’re communicating, this could be consciously or unconsciously.
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