Peer support arrangements are an evidence-based intervention for increasing interactions between children with disabilities and their peers in general education classrooms (Biggs et al., 2017). Peer support arrangements involve equipping a small number of peers without disabilities to provide ongoing academic and social support to their classmate with a disability. Children learn together as they work on classroom activities, receiving ongoing support from adults in the classroom. This arrangement has been found to provide children with disabilities with enhanced opportunities to develop social and communication skills, learn from and with their peers, and broaden their peer networks. For peers, it provides the opportunity to shape attitudes toward and raise expectations for their classmates with disabilities (Carter et al., 2011).
Although peer support interventions can be individualized in response to particular children’ needs, these interventions usually have four key components:
22 b) recruiting peers from the same classroom,
c) orienting peers to their support roles
d) providing guidance and feedback as children work together (Biggs et al., 2017).
Although empirical support for peer support arrangements is strong, and research in this area has included children with a range of cognitive and physical disabilities, there is little evidence available focusing on children with ASD who use AAC (Biggs et al., 2017). In a recent review by Chung, Carter, and Sisco, (2012b) seven studies were identified that had been conducted with children with ASD using AAC, however three of the studies were judged inconclusive, and three suggestive, with only one study (Hughes et al., 2011) found to have conclusive evidence. The authors argued that more research is needed to establish an evidence base in this area.
Biggs et al. (2017) suggested that peer support arrangements may offer an avenue for mitigating the social barriers that children who use AAC experience in inclusive classrooms. They argued that children who use AAC’s interactions are dominated by adults because peers may not know how to interact with a classmate who uses AAC. Secondly, paraprofessionals, such as teacher aides who support children in the classroom may inadvertently hinder interactions with peers. Their presence may mean that a child who uses AAC has no need to seek assistance from peers, and the peers may feel self-conscious having to pass the ‘barrier’ of the teacher-aide to engage with the student using AAC (Giangreco, 2010). However by establishing a peer-support arrangement, supported by communication partner training, the teacher-aide role can be shifted to being more facilitative, decreasing over-reliance and minimizing the perceived social barrier (Biggs et al., 2017). Indeed Chung et al. (2012b)
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suggested that equipping communication partners with adequate skills and knowledge may serve as a critical element—or even a prerequisite— to promoting interaction outcomes for students with complex communication needs.
Despite the potential of peer-support arrangements to increase social communication and interaction, consideration must be given to the way in which a successful arrangement is structured, with particular reference to the transactional theory of friendship. This theory understands equality to be one of the five relationship properties necessary to distinguish relationships of acquaintance from those of friendship (the others being similarity, mutual liking, closeness, and loyalty). That is, for children to have a true friendship, there needs to be a largely equal give and take to interactions (Therrien & Light, 2016). While the use of peer- mediated strategies may successfully increase communication between the two children, there is the potential to establish an inequality in the relationship that negatively impacts friendship development. Peer support arrangements have typically assigned the children unequal roles in the relationship: the peer became the helper, while the child who used AAC became the recipient of help. Although many children need help in school, it is atypical for any one student to always be on the receiving end of help (Carter et al., 2014). If the ultimate goal of increasing social interaction is to support friendship development, then interventions that promote equal status relationships are required (Therrien & Light, 2016).
Trembath, Balandin, Togher, and Stancliffe (2009) conducted a study where six preschool peers were taught to implement a peer-mediated naturalistic intervention with 3 children with ASD, with and without a SGD, during play sessions. They found that when a dyad of helper and ‘helpee’ was established, the peer willingness to engage was largely dependent
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on whether they, in trying to engage in a transactional interaction, received reciprocal attention:
“The peer-mediators interacting with Shane and Aaron often received no discernable response and therefore required more consistent encouragement from the
researcher to continue trying to implement the procedure. The lack of reciprocity may have reduced the effectiveness of the intervention by creating a greater reliance among the peer-mediators on the researcher prompts to continue implementing the intervention”. (p. 183)
To combat this, it has been suggested that providing communication partner training to a whole class of children may alleviate the pressure placed on helpers in a peer support dyad, as well as increase the generalization of social skills and number of interaction opportunities (Laushey & Heflin, 2000; Trembath et al., 2009).