Designing, Developing and validating of Intervention Program Based on Executive Functions and its Effectiveness on Social Interaction in Children with High Performance Autism Spectrum Disorder

The aim of this study was to design, developing and validating an intervention program based on executive functions and evaluate its effectiveness on social interaction in children with high-performance autism spectrum disorders.

The research method is semi-experimental with a post-test pre-test with a control group. The statistical population of the present study of children with autism disorder aged 6 to 12 years in Urmia (274 people) in the academic year of 2019-20 was from the exceptional school for children with autism, out of the target population, 40 high-performance autism were selected using Gilliam Autism Rating Scale(GARS) and randomly assigned to two experimental (20) and control (20) groups. After the pre-test, the experimental group was trained for twenty-four sessions, The post-test was performed again and the pre-test and post-test data were analyzed using covariance analysis.

The results showed that in the post-test stage there was a significant difference between the mean of social interaction between the experimental and control groups at the level (P <01). This means that the intervention program has increased the scores of social interaction of autistic children compared to the pre-test stage.

Findings of this study showed that the intervention program based on executive functions, in addition to having appropriate content validity, has been effective on social interaction in children with high-performance autism spectrum; Due to the effectiveness of the intervention program based on executive functions, it is suggested that this program be used to improve the social skills of children with autism in educational and rehabilitation centers.