A Review of Developing Communication Skills for Students With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities on College Campuses
Behavior Modification
Pennington, R. C., Bross, L. A., et al. (2020).
Behavior Modification, 45(2), 272-296.
This systematic review investigates interventions targeting communication skills in college students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, including those on the autism spectrum.
No funding received
Between January 2000 and May 2020
Group experimental design studies; single-case experimental design studies
8
The majority of included studies (seven out of eight studies) focused on participants on the autism spectrum and used multicomponent interventions (e.g., a combination of prompting, video modeling, self-monitoring). A number of interventions components, such as video-modeling, prompting, and self-management, were already indicated to be evidence-based strategies for adolescents on the autism spectrum in previous studies; therefore, findings suggested that these interventions may also be effective for improving the communication skills of college students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, including autism. The following limitations of the above findings were reported:
<ol>
<li>Four of the eight included studies were published in peer-reviewed journals and the remaining studies were unpublished dissertations.</li>
<li>Only five of the included studies were of acceptable methodological quality.</li>
<li>The maintenance and generalizability of skills learned from the interventions were inconclusive.</li>
</ol>
