Preschool Peer Social Intervention in Autism Spectrum Disorder

This book presents the Preschool Peer Social Intervention (PPSI), a manualized comprehensive social curriculum to enhance peer-interaction for pre-schoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in three key domains: play, interaction, and conversation.The book outlines the PPSI’s transactional approach in each of the three intervention domains and incorporates developmental features and age-appropriate play, interaction, and conversation skills while accounting for individual differences in social communication abilities. The intervention is designed to be implemented within the child’s natural social environment, such as preschool, and it includes the child’s social agents, namely, their peers, teachers, and parents. PPSI intervention curricula addressed in this book are based on typical play, interaction, and conversation development, taking into account the social and communication challenges found to characterize young children with ASD in these domains.Building up the ability to play, interact and converse more efficiently with peers may render a substantial impact on preschoolers with ASD, with vast potential for improving not only these children’s immediate social experience with peers, but also their future social competence that relies on these early building blocks. 

Prof. Nirit Bauminger-Zviely is a full professor in Educational Psychology from UCLA, and former head of the School of Education at BIU. Prof. Bauminger-Zviely's ASD laboratory at the school of education is at the forefront of basic and applied research on the social – emotional development and peer relations of children affected by ASD including novel manualized evidenced based social interventions. Over the last two decades Prof. Bauminger-Zviely developed multidimensional evidenced-based social intervention as well as assessment procedures and scales to evaluate the ASD social phenotype. She is the author of the book "Social and academic abilities in children with HFASD", published with Guilford, and has written numerous book chapters and journal articles on the subject of ASD and peer relations, friendships, social intervention, social emotions, social cognition and social communication. Her work has been presented both nationally and internationally.