As 2009 comes to and end, it is time to wish all a happy new year an start looking forward to many exciting possibilities in 2010. In addition to many challenging and exciting work related task that definitely will come in the coming year, there are some interesting events in 2010 as well.
First in January I am really looking forward to attend ABA Internationals 4th annual autism conference in Chicago. I have been lucky enough to attend the three previous ones, and have been really pleased with those. An this year the conference includes great names as Bob Remmington, Glenn Dunlap and other great names.
Later in May, ABAI´s annual conference will be held in San Antonio. I will not be able to attend this one, but I expect this to be an interesting event as well, envying all attending it. One of the reasons making it impossible for me to attend this conference, it that the centre I am employed at are the following days arranging a jubilee conference as the centre has existed in 30 years. We are proud of getting some really great professionals to present at this conference, as Svein Eikeseth, Eric Fombonne, James Partington and Bob and Lynn Koegel. This is going to be great.
So As 2009 has been an interesting year working on applied behavior analysis, I hope 2010 will be one as well.
In the recent issue of The Behavior Analyst, no 32 – 2009, Stewart and McElwee brings up an interesting and potentially important point in describing and reporting research on relational responding; the use of terminology. As with all behavior analytic, and should be with all other research, the use of standardized terminology is a precondition for replication and for applying the research in practice. So it´s an important issue to address.
Stewart and McElwee reviews two papers, Berens and Hayes (2009) and Fin and Harrington (2007), where both studies has been using a procedures to establish contextual cues for generalizing relational responding. But there is according to Stewart and McElwee an inconsistency in the use of term, as I quite agree on.
And I really find it useful to adapt their conclusion and suggestion to a solution to avoid such inconsistencies in the future:
labeling in studies on relational responding should focus on the functional target of the protocol with respect to the behavior of the experimental subject rather than on some alternative feature of the protocol.
This of course not in conflict with investigating different aspects of teaching protocols, but as a mean to uphold a consistent terminology supporting applying the findings and replication.
As mentioned frequently the last week, Dawson et al has published a study on early intervention for toddlers with autism 18 – 30 months old. In their study they found that the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM) was significantly more effective than the children in their control group that received what ever service was available where they lived. In addition to the importance on doing this study on very young children, it is great that they also measured autistic symptoms, in terms of diagnostic movement along the spectrum, in addition to the usual measures of adaptive function and intellectual functioning.
As there are now ways to identify children with autism spectrum disorder earlier and earlier as summarized by Barbaro & Dissanayake (2009) og Zwaigenbaum et al. (2009). And put together in the tool of Autism Observation Scale for Infants (AOSI) (Bryson et al., 2008). The need for research proven interventions are increasing.
I this matter the Dawson article is a great contribution, but of course more research on effective interventions are welcomed. And specially research comparing different interventions options. As the largest weakness of this study is a not clearly defined control group.
Data collection is a central element of early intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) for preschool children, as for all other behavior analytic interventions. The collection of trail-by-trail date is just one of the elements to register, and gives useful information on children progress and quality of discrete-trail teaching.
As CBTAonline has released a behavior analytic data collection app, ABC data, for iPhone I have tried this application to collect trail-by-trail data while supervising EIBI programs for children with autism. ABC data has three customizable buttons to tap for occurrence of a response or event; and for collecting trail-by-trail data I named them “C” for correct response, “P” for prompted response and “W” for incorrect response or no response. Then you can tap start for timed data collection. After the session is finished you can email the data for more analysis in an CSV-format.
As the app then provides count, percent and occurrences per minute. You can easily analyze if the difficulties of the tasks are appropriate for the child, ineffective prompting strategies are in place, and if the child is presented with a high enough number of trails (as described by Smith, 1999).
So far I have been collecting this data when consulting the children’s team, but I could be possible to have them collect the data daily and email them to me or another consultant for analyzing and monitoring.
CBTAonling has announced the release of ABC Data Pro, with more functionality. And I´m looking forward to check this out.