The Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN) has developed guidelines for assessment, diagnosis and clinical intervention for children and young persons with ASD. This was published in 2007, but just caugth my attention.
The guidelines are similar to other guidelines published in Sweden, some states in the USA and other places, but are really up to date, and has obviously done a great deal of research to conclude. These guidelines should be known and used by all giving services to children with ASD.
You can download the Guidelines for their web-site, they come in full version, version for parents, and for young persons.
A recent study published by Jennifer Gibson, Ian Grey and Richard Hastins in Journal of Autism and other Developmental Disorders (2009) has taken up the fact that we unfortunately know very little about factors potentially affecting the performance of therapists delivering Early Intensive Behavior Interventions or ABA interventions to young children with autism.
Through a questionnaire filled out by 81 therapists this study investigated their reports of burnout and perceived therapeutic self-efficacy. And found that perceived supervisor support played a central role in the prediction for reduced burnout and increased self-efficacy.
This is important results as they indicate that both support and style in supervision play a critical role in burnout and self-efficacy for therapist and should guide the clinical practice for those delivering supervision services in EIBI.
And this study follows great several studies on different aspects of EIBI and their effect on overall results.
The Association for Behavior Analysis International´s conference in Oslo is approaching, only a little more than a week left. It´s a great event, and it´s of course special that the conference this time is in Norway.
A look at the program shows a lot of great presenters presenting a variety of interesting materials, and I really looking forward to the conference. I have heard that there is possible to register on-site, so it´s not to late to get to Norway and Oslo for an great ABA-event….
Mizner and Williams from the University of Tennessee published an article in Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions where they have investigated 29 experiments within 26 publications of the effect of student choices on academic performance.
They found that these studies showed that where the students could influence and make choices on performance goals and standards, the nature of assignments, instructional support within assignments and/or rewards for academic performance they showed better academic performance. These results is for students with significant cognitive or behavioral problems where 80% of the participants showed better performance, but for general education students in only 12 % of the experiments.
Souliéres and colleagues has published a study showing that people with autism solve problems, measured by Raven´s Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM), up to 40 % faster than people without autism with the same IQ score, as measured by Wechler intelligence score. RSPM assays abilities to flexibly infer rules, manage goal hierarchies, and perform high-level abstractions.
The study had 15 participants with autism and 18 without autism, who where matched on age, sex, manual preference and Wechler IQ. And all participants solved the tasks from RSPM while in a MR-scanner to investigate brain activity. And according to the researchers this scanning show that some times persons with autism uses their enhanced visual processing, and particular parts of the brain, to solve problems.
The study is published in Human Brain Mapping, and also reported in Norwegian at forskning.no.
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