I´m these days implementing new procedures on teaching categorization skills to the children receiving EIBI. In the planning and writing of procedures, I´m wondering what to try out now. The one thing that is certain is that the new procedures will build on knowledge and recent research on derived stimulus relations.
The first alternative is to implement procedure based on recommendations by Miguel and Petursdottir where the focus is to teach tacting og stimulus name and multiple tacting, both stimulus name and category name or label. There are several reasons to try this.
But, it would be interesting to try out a procedure including contextual cues as “contains”, “is a member of” in the teaching procedure. This may be harder to establish, but the generativity would probably be much greater.
Maybe I´ll end up trying out both. Anyone who have experience in any of these procedures?
As I try to stay up to data on research on Applied Behavior Analysis, and autism. I read quite a few scientific articles through the time. It´s of course been a great to get all these articles electronically, I´m not good at organizing articles or other things on paper.
But, after I while it becomes many articles, my article library now consists of approximately 4.000 papers, and at that number it begins to be hard to organize all the files. So after scanning the Internet, and trying out some applications I have landed on using Papers.
Papers has great search opportunities, the possibility to organize your papers by author, year, topic etc. This is great, specially when you are writing articles of your own. I also like that Papers organize your files in a logical Folder structure, which is great if you want a file in other applications. And it does it automatically :)
The only thing so far I miss so far, is the function of references in word processors, like EndNote does, but maybe I end up using both….
I have on several occasion implemented the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) for small children with autism, and on some occasions for elder persons with mental retardation and/or autism with success. Not all has reached all the levels in PECS, but it has always gave the persons a means of communication, and as far as I can see improving their every day life.
In the current issue of Focus on Autism and other Developmental Disorders, Beth Sulzer-Azaroff for University of Massachusetts and Hoffman, Horton, Bondy and Frost from Pyramid Educational Consultants, Inc. published a summary of the research done on PECS up to now. They analyzed thirty-four peer-reviewed reports, and their findings suggest:
that PECS is providing people around the globe who have no or impaired speech with a functional means of communication.
The article gives a great overview of the research done on PECS over the years, and the authors suggest several areas for further research. I specially appreciate and support their suggestion on conducting more research on the influence on the behavior analytic component in PECS, as i always has emphasized the analysis of the communicative behavior in implementing PECS.