Thomson and colleagues from University of Manitoba, has an excellent article in press in the journal Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders. It´s a review of research done on teaching individuals to deliver Discrete Trail Teaching (DTT).
The article review the components of instructing parents, para-professionals, and other professionals and bring some interesting results, but not surprisingly concluding with the need of more research.
And one of the elements this article highlight is the use of standardized measurement of the delivering of DTT. The authors presents the Discrete-Trials Teaching Evaluation Form (DTTEF) submitted for publication by Fazzio, Arnal, & Martin. The DTTEF 21 items that are field-tested to measure the application of DTT. This looks like an interesting and useful tool for supervisors and program managers to secure quality in an EIBI – program. And it´s a welcomed addition to earlier published tools for evaluating DTT.
So let´s hope more researchers use the same measurements in evaluating teaching and instruction for DTT delivering, as the field of EIBI needs efficient methods to widespread these skills.
Eric Fombonne is publishing a new article on Epidemiology of pervasive developmental disorder in Pediatric Research, reviewing 43 published articles that estimates the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) or pervasive developmental disorders, including the most common diagnosis in the spectrum.
The study finds the increase in prevalence and states: “There is evidence that the broadening of the concept, the expansion of diagnostic criteria, the development of services, and improved awareness of the condition have played a major role in explaining this increase, although it cannot be ruled out that other factors might have also contributed to that trend.”
Fombonne has provided the field of autism with much knowledge on prevalence, and it´s good to see the great work being continued!
Reah, Chawarska, Cicchetti and Volkmar published in 2008 a study on Language outcomes of toddlers with ASD, in a Two Year Follow-up that I just came over as I was searching for something else. But that’s usually how I find articles to read. The article is published in Research Autism.
The study reevaluated thirty-seven children who received a clinical diagnoses of ASD at age 15-25 months approximately two years later (at least one year later) to assess their progress in language and several other areas. The study reveals several interesting results, as the clinical diagnosis given at early age seems to hold to years later. This of course gives useful information regarding earlier diagnosis and early intervention helping children with ASD.
The study also shows that the difference in verbal and non-verbal scores where significant at the first assessment, but not on the second visit, something that raise several questions, but could be seen as a positive result.
The most interesting in this study could have been how different services influences the results. The study collected data on what services the children and families received but there are not done analysis of the effect of different services and interventions had on these results. The lack of such analysis makes the results less valid from my point of view, as it´s reasonably to assume that different services has different impact on progress in different areas, and such an analysis could have giver useful information on effectiveness of different interventions.
I really hope that further studies in this area could incorporate such analysis, and enriching the knowledge both on early identification and early intervention for children with ASD.
Anne R. Cummings and James E. Carr has published an interesting study in Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis regarding measurement in behavioral programs for children with autism.
The study compares continuous and discontiniuous measurement in behavioral programs. Continuous measurement involves collecting data on child response and prompt level on every trail in teaching sessions, while discontiniuous measurement involves that date are recorded for a subset of learning trails. Ex. the first or the last or both.
The results reveal some interesting aspects that could guide program managers and developers to become more effective in the data collection and increase learning within their program.
In the previous weeks I have been doing a lot of assessments using Dr. Sundbergs VB-MAPP. As I have written previously it´s a great assessment tool to design and monitor ABA programs for early learners with autism (probably others also..). And I´m now using VB-MAPP instead of ABLLS-R. This to get some more experience with VB-MAPP, maybe I will use ABLLS-R for some children in the future. I´m not sure yet.
As it´s a great tool, there are some things I struggle with so far. This may be due to lack of experience with the assessment tool, or is it due to the design of VB-MAPP?
The element of VB-MAPP that I so far experience as a weakness of the tool, it that to many milestones seems to be done by clinical judgement, and is difficult and seems impossible to test objectively in a test-session. This also includes some of the milestones that’s marked with T for Testing. I´m of course going to get more experience, and exchange my experience with others to see if there are smarter and better ways for doing this. And of course I´m really interested in hearing your experience……