The present study used functional analysis and tested for the effects of a treatment package on the increase of play and decrease of stereotypy with a student with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who attended an inclusive international school in Hong Kong. The treatment package was a partial replication of a toy conditioning procedure from Tsai Greer (2006). The play used was games on an iPad. The functional analysis conducted suggested that the high rates of stereotypy observed were being maintained through automatic reinforcement. Furthermore, the student was chosen to be in this study due to his observed high rates of stereotypy and limited community of reinforcers. Results show a correlation between the play conditioning procedure and subsequent reduction in stereotypy. Copyright ©2024 Mercy College New York.

The Caregiver Strain Questionnaire assesses the three dimensions of caregiver strain, namely the objective, subjective externalized and subjective internalized strain. It was validated among caregivers of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the United States and Mainland China with promising psychometric properties. This study aimed to develop and validate the Chinese (traditional script) version of the Caregiver Strain Questionnaire (C-CGSQ) among 198 caregivers of children with ASD in Hong Kong. The C-CGSQ showed excellent internal consistency (α = 0.958) and test-retest reliability (Spearman’s r  = 0.966). Concurrent, convergent, divergent validity and a three-factor structure (consistent with previous studies) were established. The C-CGSQ demonstrated promising psychometric properties in measuring caregiver strain among caregivers of Chinese ASD children in Hong Kong. Copyright ©2024 Springer.

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated the adoption of distance learning as a new alternative educational approach globally, a shift that has persisted even to the post-pandemic period. Despite identifying online educational advantages in previous studies, the abrupt societal changes brought about by the pandemic have exposed disproportionate difficulties. This study aims to understand how attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) children and their parents are influenced by this educational pattern, and to outline a framework to improve their home-based learning environment from a design perspective. Following the Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle (KELC), the research commenced with the analysis of ADHD children and online-schooling in Hong Kong. After problems are identified initially, the observational study of 32 school students with or without ADHD in a home-learning environment is conducted to interpret these problems. This process has identified the key issues of domestic distraction and the need for resource support. The study also provides a multi-functional table design as an initial direction for developing supportive frameworks. Then, another study is conducted with a total of 30 school students with or without ADHD and their stakeholders to assess the effectiveness of the design concept. Therefore, the study's findings provide a valuable insight for proposing the framework to improve the home learning experience via the working area for ADHD children. These research findings not only contribute to academic discourse for validating ADHD children challenges in distance education, but also facilitate ADHD parents, educators and designers to enhance the home learning environment by offering a structured design framework. Copyright ©2024 Scientia Socialis Ltd.

"The Transporters" intervention contains 15 animated episodes that autistic children watch daily for a month and learn emotion recognition through stories depicting social interactions between vehicle characters with grafted human faces, expressing emotions. Its automated, home-based format is cost-effective. This study included four groups of young Chinese children in Hong Kong: two intervention groups (an autism intervention group and an autism + attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) intervention group), an autism control group and a non-autistic group. The autism + ADHD intervention group was one that had not been separately examined before. In this study, "The Transporters" episodes were delivered via an App instead of the dated DVD technology. Following "The Transporters" intervention, both autism and autism + ADHD intervention groups improved significantly and similarly on emotion recognition and were more like the non-autistic group, while the autism control group did not. Learning was generalizable to novel situations/characters. There was no dosage effect, with the standard recommended number of episodes viewed as sufficient for significant improvement. Besides confirming the effectiveness of "The Transporters" for young Chinese autistic children, this study contributes to the literature/practice by expanding the range of applicability of "The Transporters" to autistic children with ADHD, which is important given the high co-occurrence rate between autism and ADHD. Copyright ©2024 SAGE Publications.

This study examined the associations between teachers’ beliefs and behaviors related to inclusive education (IE) and their evaluations of social and academic competences in students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) – important indicators of IE. Utilizing the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), the research investigated how teachers’ intentions to implement IE and their supportive practices affected the social and academic competences of students with ASD. The study involved 267 teachers from 78 mainstream secondary schools in Hong Kong. Teachers completed a questionnaire assessing attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and intention to implement IE. Information on teachers’ practices supporting students with ASD and their evaluations of social and academic competences of these students was also collected. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the relationships between these variables. Correlation analysis revealed positive and significant associations between teachers’ beliefs, inclusive practices, and their evaluations of social and academic competences of students with ASD. SEM indicated that perceived behavioral control significantly and positively influenced the social and academic competences of students with ASD through teachers’ inclusive practices. This study highlights the vital role of teachers’ control beliefs and inclusive practices in fostering the social and academic competences of students with ASD. By applying the TPB and SEM, the research contributes to understanding how teachers’ intentions and behaviors in implementing IE impact students’ outcomes. The findings offer practical implications for enhancing inclusive education practices for supporting students with ASD in mainstream schools. Copyright © 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Students with Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Difficulties (SEBD) pose a major challenge to inclusive education. A positive teacher-student (t-s) relationship has been confirmed a vital factor in the development of students with SEBD. In Hong Kong, students with SEBD may study in mainstream schools, or special schools with residential service, while in Thailand, parents can only choose mainstream schools (either public or private) for their children with SEBD. A qualitative study was conducted in two Hong Kong special schools (one primary and one secondary) and one private school (with both primary and secondary schools) in Thailand to explore teachers’ perceptions of the t-s relationship among students with SEBD. The three schools offer residential services. Information was collected mainly from individual interviews with 21 teachers from these three schools. Themes emerging from the analysis reflect that the cultural concerns about the difference between‘relationship’ and ‘guanxi’ require further elaboration and discussion. Copyright @ 2023 Center for Promoting Ideas, USA.

Globally prevalent, Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) have negative consequences on students’ social, intellectual, emotional, and post-school transition results. While assessment tools exist, the majority of them were developed from the perspective of clinical psychology and/or healthcare. Some are lengthy and commercialized, and some have weak factorial validity. A feasible and practical assessment method, from the perspective of educational psychology and assessment, is required to better accurately and effectively assess the social and academic performance of ASD students in inclusive settings. With an emphasis on teachers’ practice and output in helping students with ASD in inclusive education, this study evaluated the Practice and Product Inventory of Supporting Students with ASD (PPI-SSA) psychometric qualities. PPI-SSA was designed to be practical, concise, and especially suited for quantitative research on ASD. The inventory was administered to 411 teachers in Hong Kong, and exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirmed the PPI-SSA’s reliability and validity. A follow-up path analysis examined the concurrent validity of the PPI-SSA, revealing significant pathways between teachers’ intentions to implement inclusive education and each of the respective dimensions within the PPI-SSA. Measurement invariance results showed that the PPI-SSA demonstrated configural, metric, scalar, and residual invariance across primary and secondary teachers. The PPI-SSA, as a non-commercial instrument, has meaningful implications. It can facilitate the efficient collection of more empirical data on the social and academic achievements of students with ASD, informing evidence-based improvement of inclusive practices. It can assist in teachers’ practice to identify the diverse social and academic needs of students with ASD to align with their corresponding adjustments of teaching strategies. Copyright © 2023 by the authors.

The phenomenological qualitative study was conducted to present the in-depth and collective individual experiences in this study. The aim of the study was to uncover the essences of lived experiences of the caregivers with rearing their children in secondary school.Due to the nature of studying a marginalized community, purposeful sampling was adopted to recruit the informants who have the experiences of bringing up a child with diagnosed with dyslexia, and their child had experienced in local secondary schools in Hong Kong. Over the period 2017-19, twelve parents were invited and finally involved in the in-depth interviews. Consent form was conducted before the interview, and the researcher informed all informants the interview processes and the purpose of the study before the interviews through the phone and/or email.Qualitative data analyses through a software package Nvivo. Seven overarching themes were yielded, 1) Feeling frustrated in parent-school collaboration; 2) Feeling discriminated about their children’s experience; 3) Facing emotional difficulties in care-taking; 4) Feeling relieved and be more reflective; 5) Feeling powerless but critical to the education system and Confucian culture; 6) Feeling stressful in financial support; and 7) Feeling resilient in difficult time. The result revealed that parents of children with dyslexia were quite common to have unpleasant experiences in collaboration with schools, encountered misunderstandings and conflicts. They often felt worried, stressful, helpless, powerless, and discriminated in school, even in society, but resilient at the end. In the process of collaboration, although they have not much positive experience in cooperation with schools, most of them finally become stronger to face various difficulties in their lives.The current findings should be a signal to the education bureau to review their policy who promote the inclusive education in Hong Kong. In addition, educators, parents, school counsellor, school

The availability of educational data in novel ways and formats brings new opportunities to students with special education needs (SEN), whose behaviour and learning are highly sensitive to their body conditions and surrounding environments. Multimodal learning analytics (MMLA) captures learner and learning environment data in various modalities and analyses them to explain the underlying educational insights. In this work, we applied MMLA to predict SEN students’ behaviour change upon their participation in applied behaviour analysis (ABA) therapies, where ABA therapy is an intervention in special education that aims at treating behavioural problems and fostering positive behaviour changes. Here we show that by inputting multimodal educational data, our machine learning models and deep neural network can predict SEN students’ behaviour change with optimum performance of 98% accuracy and 97% precision. We also demonstrate how environmental, psychological, and motion sensor data can significantly improve the statistical performance of predictive models with only traditional educational data. Our work has been applied to the Integrated Intelligent Intervention Learning (3I Learning) System, enhancing intensive ABA therapies for over 500 SEN students in Hong Kong and Singapore since 2020. Copyright © 2023 IEEE.

This chapter discusses a service learning course using combined board game activities and direct social skill teaching to enhance social and communicative skills of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Ten students with ASD/social and emotional problems (aged 6–8) were invited to participate in an 8-week after-school training programme in a Hong Kong ordinary school. Each session was divided into two parts with 30 min of direct social skills instruction conducted by a teacher, followed by 60 min of board games facilitated by undergraduate students who were attending a social service learning course in a university. Most students with ASD engaged in playing board games and could apply the social and communicative skills that they learned in the training programmes. Facilitators also reported an increase in comprehension skills of students with ASD. Copyright © 2022 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.