Applying gamification to reduce stigma towards students with Autism Spectrum Disorder in mainstream schools

Abstract

This proposal maintains the original aim of creating a ludic, motivating, evidence-based intervention tool and empirically evaluating its effectiveness and generality and overall engagement of the participants. Due to preliminary results of a systematic review of the literature, we opted for moving from the development of a software to the planning of an interaction contingency to teach essential skills for the relationship of the typically developing children with their ASD pairs. Using gamification allows us to plan a teaching environment more similar to the real situation that the interactions will naturally happen. Gamification also allows us to create new procedures for the development of those tools, which gives higher chances of technological innovation. For the fulfillment of this proposal, the thesis will have five papers: the first will operationalize the concept of stigma using a systematic review and conceptual analysis. The second paper is a systematic review of teaching procedures usually adopted for reducing stigma towards students with neurodevelopmental disorders. The third paper describes the definition of desired learning outcomes, using behavioral procedures of definition and decomposition of desired behavioral outcomes. The fourth paper describes the procedure of development of the tool and pilot evaluation. The last paper consists of the empirical evaluation of the tool, using a single-subject design, in a natural environment (mainstream school with inclusive classes). For the qualifying examination, the first four papers will be presented.