Department of Special Needs Education

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https://escholar.umt.edu.pk/handle/123456789/1190

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Browsing Department of Special Needs Education by Author "Momna Amir"

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    Level of Expertise of Paraprofessionals in Managing Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
    (University of Management & Technology, 2017) Momna Amir
    Paraprofessionals have become the backbone of special education classes providing services for students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (Stratton, 2014). Many students with ASD struggle with challenging behaviors that may not only affect their learning environment but the learning environment for all students in their classroom. Paraprofessionals play an important and dynamic role in supporting behavioral and educational opportunities for students with Autism and in helping to make the implementation of instructional activities more efficient and effective. Unfortunately, paraprofessionals are hired with little or no previous experience in working with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The purpose of this study is two-fold, one is to explore the skills a paraprofessional need to have to take care of the children with ASD and secondly to determine the degree of competence they owned in their skills. A total of 82 participants were selected from which 7 were the principals of different special schools and 75 were paraprofessionals. Total 16 schools were selected for collecting data for this study. This was a mixed method research in which quantitative phase was developed on the basis of qualitative phase. Thematic technique was used to analyze qualitative data whereas descriptive statistics and ANOVA were used to analyze quantitative data. Overall results of this study shows that paraprofessionals have moderate to high level of expertise in managing children with Autism.