To day I received notice that a new number of the journal The Psychological Record has been published. I find this a journal often publish good articles, specially related to stimulus equivalence and derived relational responding, also in this number. And I really looking forward to read these artickles:
- O´Connor et al. The Role of Verbal Behavior, Stimulus Nameability, and Familiarity on the Equivalence Performance of Autistic and Normally-Developing Children
- Myrphy and Barnes-Holmes. Establishing Derived Manding for Specific Amounts with Three Children….
- McVeight and Keenan. Multiple Functions in Equivalence Classes; and
- O´Toole and Barnes-Holmes. Three Chronometric Indices of Relational Responding as Predictors of Performance on a Brief Intelligence Test….
So, as I´m home from work to day, I´ll have some great reading….
As I have started to assess many of the children with ASD using Sundbergs VB-MAPP, I constantly gather more and more experience. And to day one of my colleagues pointed out a possible strange aspect of the VB-MAPP.
As we had finished the milestone-assessment we moved on to the skill-tracing and discovered that there may be some logical difficulties in the link between them. As the milestone is if the child uses 4 adjectives and 4 adverbs in sentences, one of the skills in the skill-tracing is the ability to name relatives. This child mastered the milestone, but not the mentioned skill. How do this relate?
Of course one explanation is that the skills from the skill-tracing are skills that facilitate the development of the milestones, and this makes sense. But on the other hand it´s not making total sense that you can master a milestone, but not master the skills that are supposed to facilitate it.
As providing therapy and interventions to children and adults with ASD, I will claim that communication is the core element of every intervention and therapy. One of the core-symptoms of ASD is problems related to communication, and interventions in as good as every other area, must have a basis in communication; social skills, problem behavior etc.
But from time to time I meet children with autism, and also adults, who in spite several years of different interventions does not have a means of communication. They are left up to the people around´s interpretation of their behavior, and as a consequence the person with ASD have extremely limited possibility to interact and influence their own life. This is always devastating to see, and I will strongly uphold that our first goal as professionals is to contribute to the development of communication, preferably through speech, alternatively thorough signs, PECS or other AA…
I have recently purchased Mark Sundbergs assessment tool VB-MAPP, and I have started to try it out in my work at Glenne regionale centre for autism. Due to the short time I have had access to this tool, I have just had time to try it out on two children, and just as a base-line assessment.
But I would really like the assessment tool to be more flexible, not in the milestones, but in how the milestones are organised. Now the protocol is organized by levels, but I would need the possibility to sort the milestones by topic, ex. by mands regardless of levels. Especially if I do not have the time to do a whole assessment. It would also be really useful if the milestones could be sorted by method of data collection, so that you could get all the milestones that require observation sorted together. So what I really need is for WB-MAPP to come as a web-based service or an application so it could be more flexible, wondering if anyone is doing that?
To temporarily come around these “short comings” I have made some lists of the milestones with various sorting to use in my daily work (in Norwegian).