Planning an Executive Functions Curriculum and Evaluating Its Effectiveness on Improving the Empathy in Children with High Performance Autism Spectrum Disorder

This study aims to plan and detect the effectiveness of the educational package of executive functions on improving the empathy in children with a high-performance autism spectrum disorder. In term of purpose, this research is applied, and the research method is semi-experimental with a post-test–pre-test with a control group. The statistical population consists of children with autism disorder aged 6 to 12 years old in Urmia (274 people) in the academic year of 2019–20 from the exceptional school for children with autism. Out of the statistical population, 40 high-performance autism children were selected using Gilliam Autism Rating Scale (GARS) and randomly assigned to two experimental (20) and control (20) groups. Then, the Griffith cognitive and emotional empathy scale (GEM) was filled out by the parents of both groups. After the pre-test, the experimental group was trained for twenty-four sessions, and the post-test was performed. The data was analyzed using SPSS software and univariate analysis of covariance. The data showed a significant difference between the control and experimental groups in terms of the post-test scores and empathy scores after adjusting the effect of the pre-test of Empathy (p < 0.01). Based on this study, it can be propposed that improving executive functions can increase the levels of empathy.