Teach Social Skills

Below is a list of the resources we have developed to support educators as they teach students social skills.

Why Generalization

Students who receive special education services often learn skills in isolation or outside of the natural environment relative to the skill. In order for the skill to have a meaningful impact on the student’s life and be sustained over time, it is critical for students to be taught how to use the skill in a way that it can transfer across environments, situations, people, and be used in multiple ways.

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Social Skill Inventory

Through an extensive process, our team simultaneously reviewed 25 current social skill assessments and distilled our social skills to 183 within 10 domains. From those domains, we designed the VOISS Inventory which can be used by educators, pre/post intervention or formatively, as a progress monitoring tool to determine what social skill(s) their students are struggling with, where to begin in the VOISS virtual reality system, and how students are progressing, over time.

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Lesson Plans

For each of the 10 social skill domains in VOISS, there are five lesson plan samples to support the social skill needs of a student exhibiting those specific characteristics. Educators can run keyword searches to find samples for their individual students.

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National and State Standards

The VOISS Domains have been aligned to national and state standards in social skills. This interactive aspect of VOISS Advisor allows any educator to understand how the various domains support teaching and learning efforts in social skills.

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IEP Goals

Each social skill domain in VOISS has a classroom story, or case study student who exhibits characteristics of someone who struggles with social skills in that domain. In this section of VOISS, we have summarized all of the IEP goals being addressed across VOISS, per social skill domain.

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Evidence-Based Practices

Explore instructional methods, generalization tactics, and instructional supports that you can use to help educators facilitate student generalization of learned social skills into the classroom.

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VOISS

The VOISS app offers educators, students, and their families 140 social skill scenarios that teach knowledge and understanding of 10 Social Skill Domains and 183 unique social skills. VOISS is a virtual reality learning experience that features a number of support for students, educators, and families to further learn and apply social skills in the classroom and greater school setting.

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Progress Monitoring

The VOISS Advisor Progress Monitoring tool is the teacher’s portal into student VOISS virtual reality progress and skill attainment. Teachers can see which of the social skill domains and skills are being learned and practiced, how fast the student is moving through, how accurate their responses are, how many attempts they need to complete each scenario and how their progress matches up to the expectation the teacher established for progress to be made.

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Classroom Stories

These classroom stories are case study examples of students who struggle with specific social skills within ten social skill domains. Each classroom story includes an overview of the student, their learning strengths and needs, their teacher’s perspectives, and five lesson plans that demonstrate the practice and generalization of skills learned in virtual reality into physical classrooms.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How much does VOISS and VOISS Advisor cost?

VOISS is free for download in the Apple and Google Play stores and VOISS Advisor is a federally funded project and it currently free for use!

I am a school district interested in using VOISS, how do I get started?

You can download the Apple or Google Play App under Offerings>VOISS>VOISS and VOISS Access and use the resources within Advisor to support your implementation efforts.

Who created VOISS and VOISS Advisor?

The VOISS team is primarily located at the University of Kansas and is in partnership with Syracuse University and Digital Buckeye.

What age level of student can use VOISS?

VOISS was designed for and with middle school students who struggle with social skills. Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder needing level 1 supports, as well as students with learning disabilities have been the primary users thus far. High school students and adults can find success with VOISS as well.

I want all of my teachers to use VOISS and VOISS Advisor with any student in our middle school who struggles with social skills. How do we get started?

First, we recommend that you learn more about VOISS using the resources at VOISS Advisor. If you have a professional development leader who has questions, please complete our Contact Us form and we would be happy to work with you as you roll out use.

My student has finished the scenarios I assigned to him, how do I support generalization into the classroom.

Advisor is designed to support educators as they create lessons for classroom generalization of learned skills. Use the lesson plan builder tool to search by keyword, find a lesson plan similar to your student’s needs, download it and adapt it to be individualized for them and you.

Want to Work With Us?

Through our work we have entered into several partnerships with school districts and universities. If you are a company, school district or researcher and are interested in working with us, please contact us:

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