Investigation of the Effectiveness of the Teaching Advanced Degree Mind-Reading Skills Programme in the children with high-functioning autism and Asperger syndrome

The purpose of this study is to investigate the ?Advanced Mind Reading Education Programme? prepared by the current author in terms of its effectiveness on advanced mind reading skills of children diagnosed with high-functioning autism and Asperger syndrome. A quasi-experimental design with a control group and involving a pre-test and a post-test is adopted as the research methodology. A total of 18 subjects (9 for treatment and 9 for control groups) between the ages of 7 and 14 participated in the experiment. The treatment group was given the education program, while the control group was not. A precondition for participation was having passed the first and second order mind-reading tests. In order to assess the effectiveness of the programme, both the trial and control groups were given the ?Eye Test? (that measures the ability to read emotion via eye contact) and the ?Strange Stories Test? (that measures the ability for advanced mind reading), as pre-tests. The trial group was applied the 12-session ?Advanced Mind Reading Education Program?. The dependent variables of the study are the scores from the ?Eye Test? and the ?Strange Stories Test?, and the independent variable is the ?Advanced Mind Reading Education Program?. In addition, data on social acceptability were collected from the subjects? families, and were evaluated. Findings are evaluated using the Wilcoxon Test, Mann Whitney-U Test, and Kruksal Wallis H Test. After treatment, both the ?Eye Test? and the ?Strange Stories Test? were again given to the treatment and control groups. The effectiveness of the ?Advanced Mind Reading Education Program? was evaluated by statistical comparisons of the test scores before and after treatment in the treatment and control group. Results indicate a statistically significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores in the ?Strange Story Test? for the treatment group, but no significant difference is found for the control group. Scores for neither the treatment nor the control group show statistically significant difference between pre-test and post-test scores for the ?Eye Test.? This study demonstrates that the ?Advanced Mind Reading Education Program? prepared by the author is effective in improving advanced mind reading skills of children with high functioning of autism and Asperger syndrome. Keywords: Advanced theory of the mind, mind reading, teaching of mind theory skills, high-functioning autism, Asperger syndrome.