A Systematic Review of Play-Based Intervention in Enhancing Social Skills Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) display social skills dysfunction, such as lack of social interaction, communication skills, social engagement, emotion recognition and social play. One of the aspects being emphasized in managing behaviour of ASD and other categories of learning problems is teaching social skills and academic skills. While learning through play to strengthen social skills behaviour has gained its place in normal preschools but it has been neglected for children with disabilities in classroom settings. Hence, a pressing need for more studies to look into play-based intervention, particularly within the school setting, so as to enhance social skills functioning amongst children with ASD. In fact, many studies have exemplified the benefits of play for those diagnosed with ASD. As such, this review combs through evidences that employ play as an intervention for children with ASD in enhancing their social skills. The objectives of this review are: (i) to identify empirical studies that employed play-based interventions in enhancing the social skills amidst children with ASD, and (ii) to identify the type of play approach applied in natural setting. In order to gather published articles for the study, online databases, such as ScienceDirect, ERIC, ProQuest, PsycINFO, PubMed, Springer link, JSTOR, and Google Scholar, were used for data search. Thirty papers were collected and the outcomes suggest that numerous studies have explored schools to investigate a wide range of play strategies in both structured and unstructured approaches based on specified target skills. Furthermore, this study lists the strengths and shortcomings of the reviewed studies, along with several implications that highlight the practice of play as an intervention within the school setting.