Reah, Chawarska, Cicchetti and Volkmar published in 2008 a study on Language outcomes of toddlers with ASD, in a Two Year Follow-up that I just came over as I was searching for something else. But that’s usually how I find articles to read. The article is published in Research Autism.
The study reevaluated thirty-seven children who received a clinical diagnoses of ASD at age 15-25 months approximately two years later (at least one year later) to assess their progress in language and several other areas. The study reveals several interesting results, as the clinical diagnosis given at early age seems to hold to years later. This of course gives useful information regarding earlier diagnosis and early intervention helping children with ASD.
The study also shows that the difference in verbal and non-verbal scores where significant at the first assessment, but not on the second visit, something that raise several questions, but could be seen as a positive result.
The most interesting in this study could have been how different services influences the results. The study collected data on what services the children and families received but there are not done analysis of the effect of different services and interventions had on these results. The lack of such analysis makes the results less valid from my point of view, as it´s reasonably to assume that different services has different impact on progress in different areas, and such an analysis could have giver useful information on effectiveness of different interventions.
I really hope that further studies in this area could incorporate such analysis, and enriching the knowledge both on early identification and early intervention for children with ASD.
Yesterday I gave a talk on Joint attention and autism for the staff on a special school for children with autism and other disabilities. And while I was giving the talk some thoughts came to mind.
The first thought that striked me was how hard it´s to get people to grasp the concept of joint attention just by listening to somebody talk about it. Luckily I had brought some videos I could use at the end of the presentation, and when I showed those videos, it became really clear how difficult it had been to get the idea earlier in the presentation. Of course this could be because my presentation is not good enough. But I really believe that a concept like joint attention does need som practical approach for real understanding.
This fact calls for a more practical approach, as a workshop or something like that. But often people want talks, so this creates a challenge for me as to find an approach to really get a presentation that works in a way that makes the audience to grasp the concept.
The other thing that striked me as the talk went along, is that the skills thats in jiont attention, is so dependent on eye contact and functional use of gaze. So in our own program we have a challenge in incorporate this as early as possible in the program. We may be somewhat late on this now. So again I got my self som challenges to work on in the time ahead…
Anne R. Cummings and James E. Carr has published an interesting study in Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis regarding measurement in behavioral programs for children with autism.
The study compares continuous and discontiniuous measurement in behavioral programs. Continuous measurement involves collecting data on child response and prompt level on every trail in teaching sessions, while discontiniuous measurement involves that date are recorded for a subset of learning trails. Ex. the first or the last or both.
The results reveal some interesting aspects that could guide program managers and developers to become more effective in the data collection and increase learning within their program.
The last article for this number of Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders I´m going to write about on this site it the Review article published by Christopher Rayner, Carey Denholm and Jegg Sigafoos: “Video-based intervention for individuals with autism: Key questions that remain unanswered.”
The authors has reviewed earlier published reviews to assess the current state of research on the use of Video-based interventions (VBI) for children with autism. And as expected they find evidence for the effectiveness of VBI, but as the interventions as a group are quite new, there are several key questions that needs to be addressed to refine and establish VBI.
VBI are from my experience quite effective, but requires a lot of preparations and are therefor quite time consuming and require a lot of work on the therapists side; preparing the videos (filming, editing, etc..). So if the key questions outlined in this article could be answered, the interventions could be more pinpointed and effective, and probably the work required for preparation less…
In this volume of Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders there also appeared a good article; “Increasing play and decreasing the challenging behavior of children with autism during recess with activity schedules and task correspondence training” written by Wendy Machalicek, Karrie Shogren, Russel Lang, Mandy Rispoli, Mark F. O´Reilly, Jesse Hetlinger Franco, and Jeff Sigafoos.
The article describes a study done with three children with autism who were taught to use activity schedules in play activities in recess. The study also implemented correspondence training, where children received tangible reinforcement if their behavior during recess corresponded with their choice in the start of the recess.
As the study shows good results, the article describes a very useful strategy in working with children in school settings.