D5.3 National Meetings Reports 2012

In 2012, DigCurV Partners organised or attended National Meetings for the express purpose of promoting the activities of DigCurV and the Curriculum Framework development. At each meeting, the rationale behind the lenses was discussed, and the uses of lenses themselves were explained. Many partners used the meetings as a means to promote DigCurV. UGOE suggest that their meeting ‘…served as a platform for the exchange of experiences...’ and highlighted how useful the meeting was for networking. Other partners found other useful feedback from the meetings, particularly with regards to promoting future events, discussing the Curriculum Framework in its current form, and using the CURATE! game as a means of raising topics for discussion. This report looks at each national meeting in turn by country of the reporting partner. Details of the reports are presented in sections looking at the audience profile of the event, the outcomes of the meetings, and the impact of the meeting. The report concludes with a summary of the feedback and information taken from each meetng, and present recommendatons for future meetngs and work of the network

Measuring Outcome in an Early Intervention Program for Toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Use of a Curriculum-Based Assessment

Measuring progress of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) during intervention programs is a challenge faced by researchers and clinicians. Typically, standardized assessments of child development are used within research settings to measure the effects of early intervention programs. However, the use of standardized assessments is not without limitations, including lack of sensitivity of some assessments to measure small or slow progress, testing constraints that may affect the child's performance, and the lack of information provided by the assessments that can be used to guide treatment planning. The utility of a curriculum-based assessment is discussed in comparison to the use of standardized assessments to measure child functioning and progress throughout an early intervention program for toddlers with risk for ASD. Scores derived from the curriculum-based assessment were positively correlated with standardized assessments, captured progress masked by standardized assessments, and early scores were predictive of later outcomes. These results support the use of a curriculum-based assessment as an additional and appropriate method for measuring child progress in an early intervention program. Further benefits of the use of curriculum-based measures for use within community settings are discussed

Pre-treatment clinical and gene expression patterns predict developmental change in early intervention in autism.

Funder: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services | NIH | National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)Early detection and intervention are believed to be key to facilitating better outcomes in children with autism, yet the impact of age at treatment start on the outcome is poorly understood. While clinical traits such as language ability have been shown to predict treatment outcome, whether or not and how information at the genomic level can predict treatment outcome is unknown. Leveraging a cohort of toddlers with autism who all received the same standardized intervention at a very young age and provided a blood sample, here we find that very early treatment engagement (i.e., <24 months) leads to greater gains while controlling for time in treatment. Pre-treatment clinical behavioral measures predict 21% of the variance in the rate of skill growth during early intervention. Pre-treatment blood leukocyte gene expression patterns also predict the rate of skill growth, accounting for 13% of the variance in treatment slopes. Results indicated that 295 genes can be prioritized as driving this effect. These treatment-relevant genes highly interact at the protein level, are enriched for differentially histone acetylated genes in autism postmortem cortical tissue, and are normatively highly expressed in a variety of subcortical and cortical areas important for social communication and language development. This work suggests that pre-treatment biological and clinical behavioral characteristics are important for predicting developmental change in the context of early intervention and that individualized pre-treatment biology related to histone acetylation may be key

NINES Summer Workshops: Emerging Issues in Digital Scholarship

NINES proposes a two-year series of summer workshops with emphasis on institutional concerns surrounding digital scholarship in the humanities, specifically in regard to peer-review and the tenure-and-promotion process. We plan to host 22 people each year for a 5-day workshop, in which digital project leaders will interact with institutional representatives with a stake in the evaluation of scholarship. We will come at issues under rubrics: "markup and metadata," "interface," "documentation," "collaboration," and "sustainability." We hope to guide the development of projects and use the group to generate public working papers towards a rationale for peer-review and promotion. Both workshops will be held at the University of Virginia, with its rich supporting environment in the digital humanities. In combining opportunities for technical, theoretical, and institutional training and discussions, NINES hopes to cultivate digital scholarly production and reception in the humanities

S+ versus S− Fading in Prompting Procedures with Autistic Children

The purpose of this investigation was to assess the relative effectiveness of two prompt-fading procedures for teaching difficult visual discriminations to autistic children. Both prompt procedures involved within-stimulus fading where manipulation occurred on the relevant component of the discrimination. One procedure involved fading first along the S+ stimulus, while holding the S− stimulus constant. The other procedure involved fading first along the S− stimulus, while holding the S+ stimulus constant. Eight autistic children were each taught two discriminations, one by each of the prompt procedures. Results indicated that for all but one child, the discriminations were acquired significantly faster, with fewer errors, when the S+ stimulus was faded first. These findings are related to the literature on the effects of stimulus novelty on selection and learning

A randomized trial comparison of the effects of verbal and pictorial naturalistic communication strategies on spoken language for young children with autism.

Presently there is no consensus on the specific behavioral treatment of choice for targeting language in young nonverbal children with autism. This randomized clinical trial compared the effectiveness of a verbally-based intervention, Pivotal Response Training (PRT) to a pictorially-based behavioral intervention, the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) on the acquisition of spoken language by young (2-4 years), nonverbal or minimally verbal (≤9 words) children with autism. Thirty-nine children were randomly assigned to either the PRT or PECS condition. Participants received on average 247 h of intervention across 23 weeks. Dependent measures included overall communication, expressive vocabulary, pictorial communication and parent satisfaction. Children in both intervention groups demonstrated increases in spoken language skills, with no significant difference between the two conditions. Seventy-eight percent of all children exited the program with more than 10 functional words. Parents were very satisfied with both programs but indicated PECS was more difficult to implement

Multiple peer use of pivotal response training to increase social behaviors of classmates with autism: results from trained and untrained peers.

Two children with autism and 8 typical peers participated in a study designed to replicate an earlier finding of successful social-skills intervention for children with autism using peer-implemented pivotal response training (PRT) and to assess the effects of using multiple peer trainers on generalization of treatment effects. During training, peers were taught PRT strategies using didactic instruction, modeling, role playing, and feedback. After treatment, children with autism engaged in increased levels of social behavior

Increasing Spontaneous Verbal Responding in Autistic Children Using a Time Delay Procedure

One oft-cited problem with teaching speech skills to autistic children is the failure of the speech to be spontaneous. That is, the children\u27s speech often remains under the control of the verbal behavior of others rather than under the control of other nonverbal referents in the environment. We investigated the effectiveness of a time delay procedure to increase the spontaneous speech of seven autistic children. Initially, the experiment presented a desired object (e.g., cookie) and immediately modeled the appropriate response I want (cookie). Gradually, as the child imitated the vocalization, the experimenter increased the time between presentation of the object and the modeled vocalization in an attempt to transfer stimulus control of the child\u27s vocalization from the experimenter\u27s model to the object. Results indicated that all the children learned to request items spontaneously and generalized this behavior across settings, people, situations, and to objects which had not been taught. These results are discussed in relation to the literature on spontaneous speech, prompting, and generalization

Training Parents to Use the Natural Language Paradigm to Increase Their Autistic Children\u27s Speech

Parents of four nonverbal and four echolalic autistic children were trained to increase their children\u27s speech by using the Natural Language Paradigm (NLP), a loosely structured procedure conducted in a play environment with a variety of toys. Parents were initially trained to use the NLP in a clinic setting, with subsequent parent-child speech sessions occurring at home. The results indicated that following training, parents increased the frequency with which they required their children to speak (i.e., modeled words and phrases, prompted answers to questions). Correspondingly, all children increased the frequency of their verbalizations in three nontraining settings. Thus, the NLP appears to be an efficacious program for parents to learn and use in the home to increase their children\u27s speech