Research indicates that it is possible to detect autism spectrum disorders as early as 12-18 months in some cases, and there are increasingly focus on providing intervention to such young children. The assessment tools for detecting autism spectrum disorders and other disorders diagnosed on behavior are not standardized, and need further research.
Perce, Carter, Weinfeld, Desomn, Hazin, Bjork and Gallagher have published a study in The Journal of Pediatrics including the use of The Communication and symbolic behavior scales Developmental Profile Infant-Toddler Checklist on 10479 one-year old children, showing positive results in detecting autism spectrum disorders, language delay and developmental delay. This result is a positive move through a checklist that can be applied at regular child controls to detect autism spectrum disorders.
The importance of parent education for parents of children with autism spectrum disorders is quite obvious as parents are the most stable and long lasting support for most children and youths with autism spectrum disorders. And the potential benefits of such programs have been demonstrated for decades. But the parent education programs has been very different on approaches and procedures.
I this issue of Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities Schultz, Schmidt and Stichter has published a review of parent education programs for parents of children with autism spectrum disorders. In this reveiw that have included 30 published reserach articles.
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Early intensive behavioral interventions (EIBI) has been proved to be effective for children with autism, but because most studies are conducted in highly controlled settings the effect on large scale programs blended within the community is more difficult to establish.
Now it is coming more reports on the effect on community-based programs, and Leaf et al have published a report on their Autism Partnership program int this issue of Education and Treatment of Children.
Autism Partnership has collected data on children from four different clinics. Their report also describes the program and its components. First of all their program is based on the curriculum book “A Work in Progress” by Leaf & McEachin, which is a widely used book that also is translated to different languages. Secondly they have a minimum of eight weeks of rigorous training prior to working with children. Read more…
Behavior analytic interventions have been shown to be effective in promoting language for children with autism spectrum disorders. And the naturalistic approaches may be especially effective in establishing functional and generalized language for those children. Ingersol have now published an article examining the differential effect of three different naturalistic behavioral interventions.
The three interventions examined is milieu teaching, responsive interaction and a combination of those two. The results of this study indicates that milieu teaching produces more total language, indicating that the direct elicitation or the language was more effective than in-direct elicitation. But the results indicate that these interventions or methods produces different patterns of language responding. This study indicates that based on the teaching objective interventionists should target different methods.
This article is published in the Journal of positive behavioral interventions.