Video-based instruction in social-emotional skills for youth with intellectual disabilities in a summer vocational rehabilitation program

Abstract

Social-emotional skills work collaboratively with academic skills to help students connect content to real-world challenges. For successful future employment, today’s students will need to master social-emotional skills such as communication, collaboration, and problem-solving. Students with intellectual disabilities, however, possess severe deficits in mental capacity and emotional skills. For those students with intellectual disabilities, who already possess multiple employment and educational challenges; lack of social-emotional skills has been identified by their schoolto-work transition support team members as a common barrier to employment. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a vocational rehabilitation program for students with disabilities that would have included a face-to-face class of 40 participants was cancelled. As a substitute, a hybrid, Google Classroom-based delivery of a social-emotional skills intervention program was hosted at the computer lab of the vocational rehabilitation agency with only five student participants. Although a small group, almost all student participants increased their pro-social skills knowledge as well as were observed by their counselors to have improved their pro-social behaviors post-program. This case study provides some, but very limited, data to suggest that delivery of social-emotional learning curriculum by means of remote learning for students with intellectual disabilities should be further studied.