Home

Free subscription
EducationNews.org

Autism

Autism is a congenital (from birth) or developmental disorder that usually appears by age three. As in the case of most learning disabilities, it manifests itself from mild to severe. Autism is biological and affects the normal development of both social and communication skills.

Some of the symptoms of Autism are:

Difficulty with verbal and nonverbal communication. Difficulty with social interaction, and often a lack of empathy to others (preferring to be alone). Often marked by repeated body movements, such as: rocking, hand flapping, toe walking, and/or Manipulation of objects. Difficulty in moving from one task to another and/or handling changes in routes.

Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorder: Fact Sheet

Current Interventions in Autism: A Brief Analysis

Asperger's Syndrome - Guidelines for Assessment and Diagnosis
by Ami Klin, Ph.D., and Fred R. Volkmar, M.D., Yale Child Study Center.

Asperger's Syndrome - Guidelines for Treatment and Intervention
by Ami Klin, Ph.D., and Fred R. Volkmar, M.D., Yale Child Study Center.

Designing Social Skills Interventions for Students With Asperger Syndrome
published by National Association of of School Psychologists.

Asperger's Disorder

Texas Council on Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorders (DADS)

A comparison of intensive behavior analytic and eclectic treatments for young children with autism
Here are a few excerpts from this research that you may find of interest:

"Young children with autism or PDD-NOS who received intensive behavior analytic treatment (IBT) for about 14 months outperformed comparable children who received eclectic intervention services for the same period of time on virtually every followup measure."

"Providing at least 30 hours of competently delivered, intensive behavior analytic intervention to preschool-age children with autism produced large improvements in intellectual functioning, communication skills, and adaptive behavior."

"If children with autism are to have any chance to close the gap between their skills and those of their typically developing peers, their developmental trajectories must be increased sharply while they are young, before the gap widens even further. That is, their learning rates need to exceed the normal rate for an extended period of time. Of the early intervention approaches investigated in this study, only IBT had that effect, producing above-normal mean learning rates in the nonverbal, receptive language, expressive language, overall communication, and social skill domains."

"Thus the popular notion that virtually any intervention can produce meaningful benefits for children with autism if it is provided intensively has not been confirmed by two controlled studies that addressed that hypothesis."

"The effect of eclectic treatment was to flatten or decrease rather than increase the slopes of the developmental trajectories of most children. Based on these findings, we would project that those children will lose more ground to their typically developing peers the longer they remain in such intervention programs."

Call Jimmy Kilpatrick today for a free consultation
cell 832 814-7463 or info@SpecialEdAdvocate.org