A Study of Mind-Reading Teaching on the Effect of Promoting High-Functioning Autistic Children''s Theory of Mind

• Main Authors: Yu-Hua Huang, 黃玉華
• Other Authors: 張正芬
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2000
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/06429367554842137195

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 特殊教育研究所 === 88 === The main purpose of this study was to study the effect of mind-reading teaching on promoting high-functioning autistic children’s theory of mind. The test of the theory of mind was administered to the typically development children and high-functioning children with autism before a formal teaching experiments. There were two stages in this study. The first stage was a pilot study in which the test of the theory of mind was administered to the kindergarten children and grade-one and grade-two students. The second stage was a teaching experiment adopting a pretest-posttest design to explore the teaching effect. Subjects were eighteen high-functioning children with autism who were paired with each other on their verbal IQ and chronological. The half of the children was assigned into the experimental group and the other half was assigned into the control group. The children of the experimental group were taught mind-reading materials individually. Then, the posttest was administered to all subjects one week after teaching. A one-way ANCOVA was conducted for quantitative data. A qualitative data analysis was also conducted for teaching processes. The main findings of this study are as follows: 1.For the typically development children, the older the better performance on the tests of theory of mind in the first stage study. Among all items of the test of theory of mind, the highest successful percentage is on the items with situation-based emotion and the lowest successful percentage is on the items with second-order false-belief. 2.In this study, the percentage the children passing the test of theory of mind is confirmed by the findings of most foreign studies. Children with autism have highest successful percentage on the test items with situation-based emotion and the lowest percentage on the test items with first-order false-belief and second-order false-belief. 3.From the posttest, the experimental group shows higher scores than the control group which approves the mind-reading teaching effect. And, it is satisfied for the children’s progress and the teaching generalization. 4.The numbers of prompts are correlated with the level of mind-reading teaching. It is required more prompts for the high level mind-reading teaching while it is only required one or two prompts for the low-level mind-reading teaching.