THE EFFECTS OF STORY MAP WRITING ON CONTENTS COMPREHENSION AND STORY CONSTRUCTION ABILITIES OF STUDENTS WITH AUTISTIC DISORDER

This study investigated the effects of story mapping program on the comprehension and story construction ability of students with autistic disorder.

For the study, we selected three autistic students who were literate but felt difficult to comprehend and construct stories from a children development center in Korea. Twice a week, there were 40-minutes experiments from February 9th, 2015 to April 28th, 2015. For the baseline phase, we conducted a comprehension test and a story construction test after reading the prepared stories, analyzed the recordings of story retold by the students, and calculated the average cluster lengths. For the intervention phase, we trained the students to read stories and to construct story maps, tested their comprehension and story construction ability, and then calculated the average cluster lengths. The maintenance phase was identical to the baseline phases.

For story mapping, we led the students to read stories and construct story maps by their own based on the interaction with us. For the analysis on the results, the comprehension evaluation forms were used to investigate the changes in comprehension. For the intervention phase, the recordings of students’ readings were used to analyze their story construction ability and average cluster lengths.

The results of this study were as followings: First, the story mapping helped the students show better factual comprehension performance and inferential comprehension performance: Second, the story mapping was effective in improving the construction of story components: Third, the story mapping training was effective in improving the average cluster length.

Overall, the story mapping was positively effective in improving comprehension, story construction ability, and average cluster length of students with autistic disorder.