Mirena Dimolareva

Animal-Assisted Interventions in schools and other settings have grown in popularity in recent years. Research has established that the presence of a therapy dog within an educational setting promotes improvements in cognition, language, memory and social interaction for children with and without special needs (Gee, Crist & Carr, 2010; Gee, Belcher, Grabski, DeJesus & Riley, 2012; O’Haire, McKenzie, McCune & Slaughter, 2014; Gabriels, Pan, Dechant, Agnew, Brim & Mesibov, 2015). However, the research often has methodological limitation such as small sample sizes and lack of active and/or no treatment control groups. I will present research from my PhD which aimed to overcome some of the limitations of the previous research. I investigated whether a 4-week school based dog-assisted intervention improved language, cognitive skills, socioemotional factors and levels of stress for children with special needs (N=157) through a longitudinal study, which employed a randomised-controlled trial design.