The online bookstore Different Roads to Learning has published an excellent video from the online tool Rethink Autism on myths and misconceptions on applied behavior analysis for children with autism. It´s a great piece of video that should be watched;
Pivotal Response Training (PRT) is considered as an evidence-based practice and effective training of teachers and other service providers should be and is a prioritized area. In Teacher Education and Special Education: The Journal of the Teacher Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children, Jessica Suhrheinrich has published a study in training teachers in the use of PRT.
In this study the teachers attended a 6 hour-workshop in implementing PRT. After attending this workshop only 15% of the teachers meet mastery criteria for PRT, but after individual coaching the majority of teachers showed additional improvement. This indicates that an initial workshop of 6 hours is not sufficient to teach others to implement PRT, but that individual coaching can improve the implementation skills.
As described in a previous post, joint attention is a focus of many autism interventions. In number 32 of Research in Developmental Disabilities Meindl and Cannelaa-Malone has published a literature review on “Initiating and responding to joint attention bids in children with autism.” In this review the authors explored whether the published research taught responding and initiating to joint attention separately or sequentially, and whether social or non-social consequences were used during joint attention teaching.
In this review the authors included 18 studies targeting joint attention interventions for children with autism. Read more…
I´m always interesting in reading up on scientific publications on autism and behavior analysis, and often I need to get back to the research I have read. I have for several years kept my collection of articles digitally on a computer (much easier than the old binders). As a mac-user I have being using Papers from mekentosj.com for several years.
Papers 1 have been working great and I have appreciated the software, but been missing the opportunity to access my papers easily when I´m not at my mac. But when mekentosj upgraded to Papers 2 I purchased a licence and upgraded. This was from my point of view a mistake. The software has been unstable, and there have been published continuous upgrades, not fixing my problem. If I tried to search the software crashed and closed. In addition Papers 2 created several copies of all the articles filling up my hardrive (and Dropbox). So I needed a change.
After some searching I found Mendeley which is a research management tool for desktop and web, and iPad and iPhone!. It has a clean interface and is fast responding. It also matches my scanned papers with Google scholar, such as my records are up to date! I also really appreciate the possibility to access my articles on the web (as I sometimes has to work at a Windows PC).
Even if Mendeley cost a few bucks, and happy with the transfer from Papers 2 to Mendeley and think I will stuck with Mendeley for some time!
Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has deficits in joint attention – the act of sharing an experience of an object or event with a partner or other person. Joint attention and teaching of joint attention has received a lot of attention in the interventions for children with ASD for some years, and an increasing number of studies has been published. Now White and colleagues has published a systematic review of the intervention literature on joint attention.
Read more…
Normally developing children acquire information and knowledge asking parents and other caregivers by mading for information, or asking “what is it?”. Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) do not ask this question as often as other children, and often needs specific teaching in acquiring this skill. When mastered this skill may increase the learning rate and number of social interactions.
In this issue of Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, Marion, Martin, Yu and Buhler have published a study on teaching children with ASD to ask “What is it?”. In their study they used contrived motivating operations, prompt fading, manned consequences, error correction and preference assessment, in a multiple-baseline design across situations.
Read more…