Nesrhtens…..

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.

The Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) developed by Bondy and Frost has been widely used with children and adults with autism spectrum disorders both within an Applied Behavior Analytic approach and in other settings. And the PECS-manual has made the system available for many parents and professionals.

Over the years there has been published quite a few studies on the application of PECS for persons with ASD, and in this issue of Journal of Autism and other Developmental Disorders (39); Preston and Carter has published an excellent review of the efficacy of PECS. This study shows that PECS provides a means of communication for individuals with little or no functional speech, and there are indicated positive effect on social-comminicative and problem behaviors.

For more information on PECS, visit Pyramid Educational Consultants web-site.

As I try to stay up to data on research on Applied Behavior Analysis, and autism. I read quite a few scientific articles through the time. It´s of course been a great to get all these articles electronically, I´m not good at organizing articles or other things on paper.

But, after I while it becomes many articles, my article library now consists of approximately 4.000 papers, and  at that number it begins to be hard to organize all the files.  So after scanning the Internet, and trying out some applications I have landed on using Papers.

Papers has great search opportunities, the possibility to organize your papers by author, year, topic etc. This is great, specially when you are writing articles of your own. I also like that Papers organize your files in a logical Folder structure, which is great if you want a file in other applications. And it does it automatically :)

The only thing so far I miss so far, is the function of references in word processors, like EndNote does, but maybe I end up using both….

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.

As I spend much of my time giving talks and doing workshops on ABA and autism, I try to use video examples to show what ABA looks like.  Most of the time I use my own or colleague’s videos, but these are not always of top quality. I often we get into trouble if there are other children in the video; we don´t get permission to show them to a public. So I would like to have some commercial videos shoeing great ABA.

To my knowledge there are not many videos showing a variety for ABA strategies and all sides of a comprehensive ABA program produces since Lovaas´videoes. These videos shows many great examples, but of course they are getting old.

I have searched the Internet, and YouTube for videos of ABA intervention and autism. There are a great number of clips out there, but the quality of these clips vary a lot. And it´s a tremendous job to contact the owners to get permission to use them in commercial purpose. So I have now ordered two DVD´s that are made to be instructional films of the verbal behavior approach, and hoping I can use these.

But I´m afraid that this will be a search that will go on continuously….