Preparing Behavioral Interventionists for Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder via Telepractice

The prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the United States has increased exponentially within the past decade. The increasing prevalence has strained the current delivery system, resulting in a service-need gap. Identification of effective and efficient means of preparing ASD interventionists in evidence-based practices is necessary to address this gap. Telepractice, or instruction and support delivered using communication technologies (e.g., videoconferencing, online modules, and computerized software programs), has emerged as means of reducing this service-need gap by addressing barriers to obtaining quality training. To further the literature base, this dissertation contains two studies. The purpose of the first study was to synthesize the empirical literature on the use of telepractice to prepare ASD interventionists. The first study assessed the quality of the literature and identified future research priorities. A systematic search identified 12 studies for inclusion in the review. The 12 studies delivered training programs to 83 ASD interventionists, with reported improvements in interventionists’ skill reported for all 12 studies. The review also assessed the research quality of nine of the 12 included studies by applying researcher developed rubrics to evaluate the studies’ research rigor and effects of the trainings. None of the nine evaluated studies met all of the quality indicators for either group or single-case methodology. The second study evaluates the effects of a telepractice pyramidal training package on coaches’ and interventionists’ implementation of incidental teaching, as measured by the percentage of procedural steps completed and the number of communication opportunities offered. The effect of incidental teaching on students’ subsequent requesting behaviors was also obtained. Coaches were first taught to implement incidental teaching and then taught subsequent interventionists. The training package consisted of an online module, interventionist video self-evaluation, and feedback provided on interventionist self-evaluation via videoconferencing. Following the telepractice training program, coaches and interventionists reached the preset performance criteria and implemented incidental teaching with high fidelity. Generalization probes indicated that both coaches’ and the interventionists, for whom generalization was assessed, generalized their skills to a new setting. All of the child participants increased their requesting behavior above baseline levels

Self-Paced and Video-Based Learning: Parent Training and Language Skills in Japanese Children with ASD

While no exact information on the prevalence exists, it is assumed that the overall incidence of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has risen every year in Japan. However, given the lack of resources and services for families of children with ASD in Japan, there is a dearth of practical guidance for the support for those families. This study examined the effects of an asynchronous training package (i.e., self-paced and video-based learning manual) to teach two Japanese mothers to implement incidental teaching. Effectiveness of the instruction was determined using a multiple-baseline design across mother–child dyads. Results indicated that the mother participants were able to implement the intervention with high fidelity over time. However, mixed effects of the mother-delivered intervention on target language behaviours were found across the child participants’ behaviours. This study adds an evidence to support that parents can be essential and efficient intervention agents for children with ASD

Language-Assisted Deep Learning for Autistic Behaviors Recognition

Correctly recognizing the behaviors of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is of vital importance for the diagnosis of Autism and timely early intervention. However, the observation and recording during the treatment from the parents of autistic children may not be accurate and objective. In such cases, automatic recognition systems based on computer vision and machine learning (in particular deep learning) technology can alleviate this issue to a large extent. Existing human action recognition models can now achieve persuasive performance on challenging activity datasets, e.g. daily activity, and sports activity. However, problem behaviors in children with ASD are very different from these general activities, and recognizing these problem behaviors via computer vision is less studied. In this paper, we first evaluate a strong baseline for action recognition, i.e. Video Swin Transformer, on two autism behaviors datasets (SSBD and ESBD) and show that it can achieve high accuracy and outperform the previous methods by a large margin, demonstrating the feasibility of vision-based problem behaviors recognition. Moreover, we propose language-assisted training to further enhance the action recognition performance. Specifically, we develop a two-branch multimodal deep learning framework by incorporating the "freely available" language description for each type of problem behavior. Experimental results demonstrate that incorporating additional language supervision can bring an obvious performance boost for the autism problem behaviors recognition task as compared to using the video information only (i.e. 3.49% improvement on ESBD and 1.46% on SSBD).Comment: Smart Health Journa

Toolkit for Developing Skills and Capacity in Applying Foresight to Climate Resilient Agricultural Development in the SADC Region. Module 1: Introduction to Foresight

The SADC Futures project has developed a range of foresight training materials. The SADC Futures Foresight Training Toolkit forms part of this knowledge series and presents content that was given during the SADC Futures webinar series, a six-part virtual webinar series and facilitated training

Toolkit for Developing Skills and Capacity in Applying Foresight to Climate Resilient Agricultural Development in the SADC Region. Module 4: Building Scenarios

The SADC Futures project has developed a range of foresight training materials. The SADC Futures Foresight Training Toolkit forms part of this knowledge series and presents content that was given during the SADC Futures webinar series, a six-part virtual webinar series and facilitated training

Toolkit for Developing Skills and Capacity in Applying Foresight to Climate Resilient Agricultural Development in the SADC Region. Module 5: Scenario Implications and Transformational Change

The SADC Futures project has developed a range of foresight training materials. The SADC Futures Foresight Training Toolkit forms part of this knowledge series and presents content that was given during the SADC Futures webinar series, a six-part virtual webinar series and facilitated training

Toolkit for Developing Skills and Capacity in Applying Foresight to Climate Resilient Agricultural Development in the SADC Region. Module 2: Understanding Trends and Multi-sectoral and Systems Linkages

The SADC Futures project has developed a range of foresight training materials. The SADC Futures Foresight Training Toolkit forms part of this knowledge series and presents content that was given during the SADC Futures webinar series, a six-part virtual webinar series and facilitated training

Toolkit for Developing Skills and Capacity in Applying Foresight to Climate Resilient Agricultural Development in the SADC Region. Module 3: Visioning and Causal Analysis

The SADC Futures project has developed a range of foresight training materials. The SADC Futures Foresight Training Toolkit forms part of this knowledge series and presents content that was given during the SADC Futures webinar series, a six-part virtual webinar series and facilitated training

Toolkit for Developing Skills and Capacity in Applying Foresight to Climate Resilient Agricultural Development in the SADC Region. Module 6: Review and Application of the SADC Futures Foresight Framework

The SADC Futures project has developed a range of foresight training materials. The SADC Futures Foresight Training Toolkit forms part of this knowledge series and presents content that was given during the SADC Futures webinar series, a six-part virtual webinar series and facilitated training