Diagnosis and Treatment of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders by Elizabeth McMahon Griffith

Author:Elizabeth McMahon Griffith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781593637811
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.

How Should We Intervene?

Among the critical elements in intervening with children with ASD, there is a clear emphasis on intensity of intervention. Research clearly has demonstrated that at least 25 hours a week of active engagement in planned programming is required for promoting the best outcome in children with ASD. Active engagement is defined as the child working toward individualized goals in an effortful manner. Further, there is evidence that children with ASD have difficulty maintaining gains, which provides support for needing children with ASD to be engaged in active learning all 52 weeks of the year.

Children need to be engaged in activities that are specifically designed to target their individualized objectives and that use good teaching strategies. The developmental appropriateness of both the teaching techniques and the targeted objectives must be considered, as progress will be optimized by following a developmental sequence. The use of systematic, planned, and developmentally appropriate instruction is critical. According to special education law, individualized objectives should be observable, measurable behaviors and skills, and ongoing measurement of progress toward objectives must be documented frequently (i.e., at least every 3 months) so that changes in the intervention program may be made if progress is not forthcoming.

It is important that providers, early intervention agencies, school districts, and parents work together to identify programming that is matched to the individual child’s needs, developed and implemented to promote educational gains, and not limited only to current program availability (Iovannone, Dunlap, Huber, & Kincaid, 2003; Mandlawitz, 2002). In the early years (birth to 3 years of age), the Individualized Family Service Plan (IFSP) guides each child’s services, while the IEP is the written plan for the school-aged (ages 3 to 21 years) individual’s education. In either case, these documents for students with ASD require an understanding of the diagnosis that allows school professionals to “move beyond the standard, procedural approach to IEPs and to make the process a dynamic one” (Smith, Slattery, & Knopp, 1993, p. 2).

In terms of specific techniques, readers are referred to the list of evidence-based practices provided by the NPDC (Tuchman-Ginsburg & Shaw, 2008) reviewed previously in this section, and to future versions of this list as the evidence base expands. Given the availability of objective reviews (e.g., the National Autism Center’s National Standards Project and the NPDC reviews) and the current level of focus on identifying and disseminating effective interventions, it will be important for providers, teachers, and caregivers to ensure that techniques being used with individuals with ASD are both based in adequate evidence and actually are being implemented correctly.

Some interventions, such as those based in applied behavior analysis (ABA), target specific skill deficits for remediation, while others are designed to teach the person with ASD to compensate for his or her deficits in a particular area, and still others are used to alter the environment in order to better support the person with autism. The strategies presented here represent examples of either approach to intervention.

Approaches that rely on principles of applied behavior analysis are designed to remediate deficits.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.