Interaction patterns of four students with severe expressive communication impairments in regular elementary classroom settings

Children with disabilities increasingly find themselves in natural settings for educational purposes. Assessment of the communication skills of children with severe communication impairments in regular education settings will require procedures that measure social interaction in natural settings, and the statistical tools to analyze data gathered in these settings. The goals of this multiple case study were to measure the amount and types of interaction patterns occurring between four students with expressive communication impairments (target students) and their communication partners in regular elementary education classrooms. The methods included videotaping of each target student and their communication partners in regular classrooms, for a minimum of four hours. Each videotape was subsequently transcribed then coded for behaviors of interest. The codes included the speaker, the target audience, the mode of communication, and the function of communication. The basic unit of measurement was the transition, a concept of interaction in which the continuous stream of behaviors is reduced into a series of discrete two-element units based on the sequence of the events. Analysis was conducted on the frequency of interactive behavior, the relationships between target student\u27s interactive functions and the partners\u27 functions, the relationships between the target student\u27s communicative modes and the partners\u27 functions, and whether dominance (inequality in the influence between participants in the interaction) was apparent in the transition interactions measured. Results related to frequency of interactive behavior indicated there was no consistent pattern for which of the three partner types was most often engaged with the target student. Also, regardless of which partner type was predominate, the target students and partners engaged in a high degree of interactive behavior. The predominate results of the analysis revealed that patterns of interaction involving the function of communication were in many respects unique across the target students. Also, each target student with multiple partners established unique interaction patterns with each of the partner types