Our team of Cultivating Communicators group leaders at Farmington Junior High for the Spring 2023 semester.
Author: Rachel Siemens | Major: Communication Sciences and Disorders | Semester: Spring 2023
Social communication allows individuals to develop the skills needed to understand and interact with others in different everyday social contexts. Since the spring of 2020, delays in children’s social communication skills have evolved due to schools moving to remote, virtual learning in response to the global pandemic, COVID-19.
In this research, I am expanding on the previous work of another honor undergraduate student, along with the assistance of my Honor’s mentor Dr. Glade. Cultivating Communicators is a social skills intervention group implemented in Farmington Junior High over the past 2022-2023 academic school year. Along with assistance from Dr. Glade, I have worked closely with the speech-language pathologist and social workers at Farmington Junior High to provide group intervention to participating students. In this intervention study, students developed their communication and social skills by participating in weekly small group meetings led by the research team on topics including but not limited to appropriate eye contact, handshakes, and introductions when meeting new people. Additionally, groups attended large group meetings monthly with both the school-based speech-language pathologist and the research team.
Twenty Junior High students, ages 12-15, recruited by the working school-based speech-language pathologist and partnering social workers participated in the developed social communication group, Cultivating Communicators. Electronic surveys for the students and their guardians were completed pre-, mid-, and post-program, developed using Qualtrics software. This project was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and the University of Arkansas, and this research was completed in partial fulfillment of an undergraduate Honors thesis. In this program, data collection remained confidential with the consent of the participating students and their guardians. Cultivating Communicators began monthly, large-group meetings in the Fall 2022 semester for a 15-week intervention program. In addition to large-group meetings, students practiced their communication and social skills by participating in weekly small-group meetings on topics including but not limited to appropriate eye contact, handshakes, and introductions when meeting new people. In the fall semester, large-group meetings were organized with the theme of “speed friending” to have students rotate taking a turn at each given spot for one minute. At each spot rotation, students practiced introductions and handshakes followed up by recommended small talk topics (e.g., favorite book, favorite movie, hobbies) for the remaining time. Over the past spring semester, large-group meetings were organized with the theme of “cooking” in mind. The students worked in small groups to choose a recipe and create step-by-step instructions for the preparation of being able to present making it to others. For the final large-group meeting a restaurant setting was created for each student to have the opportunity to practice their social skills of acting as a server and a customer in this restaurant simulation.
While data collection and analysis are currently ongoing, over the 2022-2023 academic school year we have seen an increase in student’s perceptions of their social skills. So far, students’ rankings on how comfortable they feel interacting with others improved from 2.94 to 3.26 on a 7-point scale. Additionally, students ranked their ability to maintain proper eye contact, improving from 3 to 3.58. Students’ views on their abilities to introduce themselves to new people improved from 2.88 to 3.47. Overall, data shows that participating students’ perception of their social skill abilities improved throughout their participation in this group. An interesting thing to note is the parents agree with their children on this. Thus far, parents’ ranking of their student’s ability to maintain conversation improved from 4.36 to 4.89. Additionally, there was an improvement in parents’ perceptions of their child’s ability to introduce themselves to new people increasing from 2.71 to 3.33. It is also interesting that parent perception and student perception of the improvement in social skills parallels thus far. As stated before, data analysis will continue to be performed throughout the Fall of 2023.
As this study offers the opportunity to discover tools and methods speech-language pathologists can use to improve intervention strategies for delays in social skills, Cultivating Communicators will continue to meet in the Fall 2023 semester. Continuing research will be performed as this study’s main goal is to target and facilitate communication and the further improvement of social skills among these participants.