A Longitudinal Analysis of the Relationships Between Social, Communication, and Motor Skills Among Students with Autism.

Many students with autism have difficulties engaging with their classroom environments and forming friendships, which are mostly affected by deficits in social, communication, and motor skills. The Special Education Elementary Longitudinal Study (SEELS, 2000) data set was used, focusing on elementary age students with autism, to explore the longitudinal relationships between social, communication, and motor skills and the mediating role of motor skills in between communication and social skills by using structural equational modeling analyses. Results show that (a) motor skills mediate the relationship between communication and social skills in elementary school, (b) there are significant longitudinal relationships among these skills in elementary school. Increased motor skills may improve social skills for students with autism in elementary school.

Children's perceptions of school-based violence.

BACKGROUND: An important first step in understanding school-based violence is understanding children's subjective perceptions of the phenomena. Understanding these perceptions is likely to be a major factor in determining the integrity of both prevalence and intervention studies. AIMS: We investigated how elementary and secondary aged children perceived school-based violence. SAMPLE: A sample of 979 children from a nested random sample of elementary (grades 3-6) and middle school (grades 7-8) classrooms in Jerusalem participated in this study. METHODS: To understand children's perception of school violence, we used an instrument composed of 19 dichotomous items, each presenting a one-line description of a behaviour, which the respondent would define as either 'intentionally harmful' or not. RESULTS: Eighth graders were significantly less likely to label the behaviours described as violent compared to all other grades; and seventh graders were less likely as compared to third, fourth and fifth graders; also, some between-gender differences were found. CONCLUSION: The respondents often view the behaviours described as intentional and aggressive; this finding should serve as an impetus to widen the scope of school-based violence interventions to include these behaviours, especially for younger children.