Evaluating and improving Perspective-Taking skill in pupils with ASD using an edugame: a case study

Autori

  • Emanuela Zappalà Università degli Studi di Salerno
  • Veronica Beatini University of Salerno
  • Lucia Campitiello University of Salerno
  • Stefano Di Tore University of Salerno

Parole chiave:

Perspective-taking, Edugame, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Social skills, Empathy

Abstract

Several studies have shown that edugames can be considered an innovative educational tool to promote the acquisition of various skills, including academic, social, and motor skills. However, there is a notable lack of educational tools specifically designed to develop visuospatial perspective-taking (VPT), a key skill for STEM and socio-emotional competencies. The study aims to evaluate the effectiveness and reliability of the Virtual Classroom edugame as a tool for assessing VPT skills in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). By analyzing data from a sample of 10 children the research explores the ability of Virtual Classroom to measure VPT accurately and reliably. It also examines performance differences among the children, aiming to identify cognitive strategies and insights into how the game can support educational interventions for students with ASD.

Riferimenti bibliografici

Aiello, P., Di Tore, S., Pace, E. M., & Sibilio, M. (2016). Insegnare a leggere la mente. La realizzazione di un edugame per lo sviluppo delle abilità sociali in soggetti con Disturbo dello Spettro Autistico. Italian Journal Of Educational Research, 17, 87-104.

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th. Edition (DSM-5). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.

Berthoz, A. (1997). Le sens du mouvement. Éditions Odile Jacob.

Berthoz, A. (2007). Physiologie de la perception et de l’action. Avaible at: https://www.college-de-france.fr/media/alain-berthoz/UPL17180_19.pdf

Berthoz, A. (2011). La semplessità. Torino, Italia: Codice Edizioni.

Berthoz, A. (2017). The vicarious brain, creator of worlds. Harvard University Press.

Berthoz, A., (2015). La vicarianza. Il nostro cervello creatore di mondi. Torino: Codice Berthoz, A. (2021), L’inibizione creatrice. Torino: Codice.

Berthoz, A., & Jorland, G. (2004). L'empathie. Odile Jacob.

Berthoz, A., & Thirioux, B. (2010). A spatial and perspective change theory of the difference between sympathy and empathy. Paragrana, 19(1), 32-61.

Bukowski, H. (2018). The neural correlates of visual perspective taking: a critical review. Current Behavioral Neuroscience Reports, 5, 189-197.

Caldwell, M. P., Cheung, H., Cheung, S. K., Li, J. B., & Carrey Siu, T. S. (2022). Visuospatial perspective-taking in social-emotional development: enhancing young children’s mind and emotion understanding via block building training. BMC psychology, 10(1), 264.

Carneiro, T., Carvalho, A., Frota, S., & Filipe, M.G. (2024). Serious Games for Developing Social Skills in Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review. Healthcare, 12(508).

Cerniglia, L., Bartolomeo, L., Capobianco, M., Lo Russo, S. L. M., Festucci, F., Tambelli, R., ... & Cimino, S. (2019). Intersections and divergences between empathizing and mentalizing: Development, recent ad-vancements by neuroimaging and the future of animal modeling. Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience, 13, 212.

Davis, M. H. (2017). 23 Empathy, Compassion, and Social Relationships. The Oxford handbook of compassion sci-ence, 299.

Decety, J., & Lamm, C. (2009). The biological basis of empathy. Handbook of neuroscience for the behavioral sciences, 940-957.

Di Tore, S., Aiello, P., Sibilio, M., & Berthoz, A. (2020). Simplex didactics: promoting transversal learning through the training of perspective taking. Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society, 16(3), 34-49.

Erle, T. M., & Funk, F. (2022). Visuospatial and affective perspective-taking. Social Psychology, 53(5):315-326, DOI: 10.1027/1864-9335/a000504

Flavell, J. H., Everett, B. A., Croft, K., and Flavell, E. R. (1981). Young children’s knowledge about visual per-ception: further evidence for the Level 1–Level 2 distinction. Dev. Psychol. 17, 99–103. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.17.1.99

Frick, A., Möhring, W., & Newcombe, N. S. (2014). Picturing perspectives: development of perspective-taking abilities in 4-to 8-year-olds. Frontiers in psychology, 5, 386.

Ghanouni, P., Jarus, T., Zwicker, J. G., & Lucyshyn, J. (2021). An interactive serious game to Target perspective taking skills among children with ASD: A usability testing. Behaviour & Information Technology, 40(16), 1716-1726.

Granic, I., Lobel, A., & Engels, R. C. (2014). The benefits of playing video games. American psychologist, 69(1), 66.

Healey, M. L., & Grossman, M. (2018). Cognitive and Affective Perspective-Taking: Evidence for Shared and Dissociable Anatomical Substrates. Frontiers in Neurology, 9(JUN), 1–8.

Jiménez-Muñoz, L., Peñuelas-Calvo, I., Calvo-Rivera, P., Díaz-Oliván, I., Moreno, M., Baca-García, E., & Por-ras-Segovia, A. (2022). Video games for the treatment of autism spectrum disorder: A systematic re-view. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 1-20.

Lyu, Y., An, P., Zhang, H., Katsuragawa, K., & Zhao, J. (2024). Designing AI-Enabled Games to Support So-cial-Emotional Learning for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.15576.

Malinverni, L., Mora-Guiard, J., Padillo, V., Valero, L., Hervás, A., & Pares, N. (2017). An inclusive design ap-proach for developing video games for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Computers in Human Behavior, 71, 535-549.

Martingano, A. J., & Konrath, S. (2022). How cognitive and emotional empathy relate to rational thinking: em-pirical evidence and meta-analysis. The Journal of Social Psychology, 162(1), 143-160.

McCurdy, R. P., Nickels, M. L., & Bush, S. B. (2020). Problem-based design thinking tasks: Engaging student empathy in STEM. The electronic journal for research in science & mathematics education, 24(2), 22-55.

Parsons, S. (2015). Learning to work together: Designing a multi-user virtual reality game for social collaboration and perspective-taking for children with autism. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 6, 28-38.

Parsons, T. D., Riva, G., Parsons, S., Mantovani, F., Newbutt, N., Lin, L., Venturini E., & Hall, T. (2017). Virtual reality in pediatric psychology. Pediatrics, 140(Supplement_2), S86-S91.

Peterson, C. (2014). Theory of mind understanding and empathic behavior in children with autism spectrum disorders. International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience, 39, 16-21.

Quiroga, M. A., Herranz, M., Gómez-Abad, M., Kebir, M., Ruiz, J., & Colom, R. (2009). Video-games: Do they require general intelligence? Computers & Education, 53(2), 414-418.

Sibilio, M. (2017). Vicarianza e didattica. Corpo, cognizione, insegnamento. Brescia: La Scuola.

Stiller, A., & Mößle, T. (2018). Media use among children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder: A sy-stematic review. Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 5(3), 227-246.

Vallefuoco, E., Bravaccio, C., Gison, G., Pecchia, L., & Pepino, A. (2022). Personalized training via serious game to improve daily living skills in pediatric patients with autism spectrum disorder. IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 26(7), 3312-3322.

Viola, I., Zappalà, E., & Sibilio, M. (2022). Using an Edugame to Develop Socio-Emotional and Perspec-tive-Taking Skills at School. International Journal of Digital Literacy and Digital Competence (IJDLDC), 13(2), 1-14.

Walsh, O., Linehan, C., & Ryan, C. (2024). Is there evidence that playing games promotes social skills training for autistic children and youth?. Autism 13623613241277309.

Zhang, Q., Liang, Z., Zhang, T., Wang, C., & Wang, T. (2022). Working memory capacity, mental rotation, and visual perspective taking: A study of the developmental cascade hypothesis. Memory & Cognition, 50(7), 1432–1442. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01272-0

##submission.downloads##

Pubblicato

2025-01-07

Come citare

Zappalà, E., Beatini, V., Campitiello, L. ., & Di Tore, S. (2025). Evaluating and improving Perspective-Taking skill in pupils with ASD using an edugame: a case study. Journal of Inclusive Methodology and Technology in Learning and Teaching, 4(3). Recuperato da https://inclusiveteaching.it/index.php/inclusiveteaching/article/view/237

Puoi leggere altri articoli dello stesso autore/i

1 2 > >>