Teaching Social Skills to Children with Autism Using the Cool versus Not Cool Procedure

Abstract

This study evaluated the effects of the cool versus not cool procedure for teaching three children diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder eight social skills. The cool versus not cool procedure is a social discrimination program used to increase children's ability to display appropriate social behaviors. In this study, the cool versus not cool procedure consisted of the participants observing the researcher demonstrating a social behavior either appropriately or inappropriately, followed by the participants discriminating whether the researcher demonstration was “cool” (appropriate) or “not cool” (inappropriate). For some social skills the participants role-played the social behavior following the researcher demonstration. Results indicated that participants reached mastery criterion on 50% of targeted social skills with the researcher demonstration and on an additional 37.5% of targeted social skills with researcher demonstrations plus role-plays. Only one participant on one social skill (12.5%) was unable to reach mastery criterion although performance increased from baseline.