The Effectiveness of Point-of-View Video Modeling in Improving Symbolic Play Skills of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Introduction: The aim of thee current research was to investigate the effectiveness of point-of-view video modeling in enhancing the symbolic play skills of 3 children with autism spectrum disorder. In the point-of-view video modeling (VM), the researchers were carrying or holding the video camera at eye level (from the perspective of the child) and without recording models (person) to demonstrate the play environment as a child would see it when carrying out the target skills. To this end, 9 scenarios related to all sub-titles of symbolic play skills were prepared in the study. Method: In the research conducted with 3 5-year-old male students, a multiple probe design across participants, which is among the single-subject research designs. For this purpose, 9 scenarios were prepared for all subheadings of symbolic play skills and videos were prepared. Findings: The research found that point-of-view video modeling effectively improved the symbolic play skills of the participants with autism spectrum disorder, the participants could maintain these skills, and the social validity of the study was high. Discussion: The research demonstrated that VM effectively increased the number of correct responses for all 3 children when they played with actual and imaginary objects. Furthermore, all children maintained relatively high performance during the 5 weeks after the intervention. The findings of the current research make a contribution to the literature on the usage of point-of-view VM to develop symbolic play skills with imaginary objects for children with autism.