The Effects Of Virtual Manipulatives On Time Telling Intervention For Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Virtual manipulative are interactive,technology-enabled visual representations of dynamic mathematical objects that can be applied as tools to support students’ learning of mathematics.In recent years,as special education has involved more and more technology,virtual manipulative has been gradually applied to the learning of students with autism spectrum disorders,with mathematics obtained much attention.Time telling is one of the key components of learning mathematics.It plays an important role in the current curriculum standards.Students can gradually develop a sense of time after they were able to tell times so that they can adapt to their future schedules in school,work and home environments.Therefore,this study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of using virtual manipulative to time-telling for students with autism spectrum disorders.Using a multiple probe across tasks design in a single-subject experimental design,three fourth-grade students with autism spectrum disorders were selected to learn three time telling tasks(telling the hours and the half-hour time,telling time to the nearest five minutes,and time calculation)through virtual manipulative.The entire intervention phase consists of baseline,pre-training,intervention,and maintenance.Accuracy and the number of independent steps were collected,and then analyzed by visual analysis and Tau-U effect size analysis.The social validity of the study was analyzed after the intervention through questionnaires and interviews to participants and their teachers.The conclusions of this study were as follows.(1)The participants were able to gain moderate or strong intervention effects on all three tasks in time telling after using the virtual manipulative.(2)All three participants were able to maintain the effects of the intervention in the “telling the hours and the half-hour time” and “telling time to the nearest five minutes” tasks,but not in the “time calculation” task.(3)Both participants and their teachers showed high social validity for the timetelling intervention through using virtual manipulative.