Superheroes Social Skills Program: A Literature Review

The article provides a preliminary evaluation of the effects of the Superheroes Social Skills program, which was developed to address the need for practice-ready and facilitator-friendly social skills curricula composed of evidence-based practices. Research studies have established that students with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are known to have social impairments therefore, it is crucial to address the social deficits when developing social skills programme or intervention plans for these students. With improved social skills, students with ASD are observed to develop positive relationships with peers, which in turn would boost their academic functioning and reduce the risk of mental health problems. However, the authors concluded that many traditional social skills training programme have been found to be ineffective as they often fall short in the generalization of target skills although social competence increases through the acquisition of discrete social skills. Evaluations on school-based social skills interventions that focus on skills like group play, responding behaviours and social initiations …show more content…
It is also unfortunate that effective intervention approaches such as using video modelling that incorporates typically developing peers modelling the target skills and teaching students with ASD to self-monitor the use of targeted social skills are not executed in school-based social skills interventions due to issues like lack of resources, time restraints, perceived feasibility or limited access to technology.
Radley, Jenson, Clark and O’Neill (2014) have established that Superheroes Social Skills utilizes