I have just startet up perspective-taking teaching for a new child with autism using the protocol developed by McHugh, Barnes-Holmes and Barnes-Holmes as described in the book Derived Relational Responding Applications for Learners with Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities: A Progressive Guide to Change (Professional)
. This protocol is based on Relational Frame Theory and derived relational responding.
I have used this protocol with other children with autism, and the results are really promising, both on the data collected through the teaching sessions, test for Theory of Mind and the clinical picture. But as I experienced today and have on other occasions, it´s a difficult procedure to implement.
Specially when the teaching of several reversed relations start, it gets difficult for the trainers to present the contextual cues and discriminative stimulus in a constant and clear manner. Of course it helps to have prepared the tasks well in advance, but as some children lear fast it can be difficult to hold on.
Anyone have similar experience, and what have you done to ease the effort?
A lot of the children with autism I meet has been thaugt to use the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) to express their needs and communicate with teachers, parents and other children. PECS is a great tool to help children with autism to communicate when they do not have developed vocal speech as a means of communication, but the ultimate goal is to develop vocal communication. Not all children with autism develop speech, but many does so after using PECS for some time.
And for those children many teachers and parents is uncertain when to fade PECS. But as I heard Andrew Bondy say at a conference “The child knows”. In my experience this is very true! The child knows when the people in their environment understand their speech, and the need for pictures are gone. So in my experience it´s as with all behavior analysis, let the behavior of the child and the data decide the progress in teaching!
Vismara, Colombi and Rogers have published a new study in Autism, vol 13 (1) giving parents of young children with autism 1 hour of education for 12 weeks. This program was manulized using Early Strat Denver Model. The manual are in preparation, and it will be great to see it published.
This manual and model fuses development, relationship and behavioral methosds as the Denver Model in other settings, and according to the investigators focusing on all areas of development for toddlers with autism. As this study was done with children from 10 – 36 months.
This study showed that a 12 week 1 hour parent program, with follow-up sessions successfully teached parents of young children with autism, increased functional verbal utterances, and increase imitative behaviors with the toddlers.
This is a promising study as it targets very young children with autism, and as the age of diagnosis drops investigating interventions for toddlers is essential, especially for the children below 24 months.
The intensity and expenses of autism treatment are great, and this study points in direction of more time efficient and less expensive treatments. This may lead to more children getting effective treatment. But as this is a pilot, more data is needed, specially on long term results.
I have just atending a lecture held by proffessor C. Gillberg on prevalence and incidence of autism spectrum disorders. As this numbers are quite interesting and varies from researcher to researcher, over time and to a certain degree from place to place. But the topic that caught my attention to day, was the use of diagnistic criterias for Asperger Syndrome.
From Gillberg’s talk it again become apparent how big influence the choose of criterias make on the prevalence. Gillberg of course using his own criteria claimed that the DSM-IV and ICD-10 criteria not being good enough.
I’m absolutely sure that there is a strong need form better, and as I see it, more spesific criterias for the disorder. But one of the first step toward this shuold be to agree on one set of criterias and develop those….
Lerman et al has conducted an important study published in the current number of Journal of Behavioral Education on the “Accuracy of Teacher-Collected Descriptive Analysis Data: A Comparison of Narrative and Structured Recording Formats.”
As the authors correctly points out in the article behavior analyst are often dependent on parents, teachers and teacher-aides to collect data for descriptive analyses to indicate behavior function. And often these are the only data collected before designing interventions, so the accuracy of these data are crucial to effective treatment.
This study clearly indicates that the accuracy of descriptive analyses are dependent on the method used to collect them. And this study shows that teachers with typical teacher training collect the most accurate date using structured recording formats.
This results should of course be replicated, and further research in this area would be welcomed. But these results should get practitioners to as far as it´s possible to rely on structured recording formats in collecting data for descriptive analyses.