ID44

D 44
10 training session
The trianer has to be present to check the novel idea so it’s not really independent program
The dependent variable was the number of appropriate novel solutions.
Coming up more novel ideas can be generalized to real settings?
Although authors claimed this program was effective for participants with autism, it’s unclear.

ID43. To recognize and predict in emotions in others

Silver, M, & Oakes, P. (2001). Evaluation of a new computer intervention to teach people with autism or Apserger syndrome to recognize and predict emotions in others. Autism, 5, 299-316.

 

A randomized controlled study with measurements taken pre- and post-intervention.

All participants had a clear diagnosis of an autistic spectrum disorder, an age equivalent of 7 years or greater on the British Picture Vocabulary Scale.

(Note. this scale only provides an age standard score ) and a chronological age of 10 to 18 years.

Then they were paried by age, gender, and school class to control for the effectof normal teaching. One of each pair was randomly selected to receive the computer intervention.

The experimenter group sued the Emotion Trainer during 10 daily computer sessions (over 2 to 3 weeks), whereas the control group had only their normal lessons.

 

Measures

The Facial Expression Photographs from Spence (1980)

 Happe’s Strange Stories (Happe, 1994) in which something non-literal is said that the child is asked to explain.

Emotion Recognition Cartoons: Eight situation-based emotions, six-desire based emotions and eight belief-based emotions from Teaching Children with Autism to Mind-Read: A Practical Guide (Howlin et la., 1999).

 

Design of the computer intervention

The improvement reached significance on the Emotion Recognition Cartoons and Strange Stories  but not on the Facial Expression Photographs.

ID.42. Augmentative and alternative communication

Ogletree, B. T., & Harn, W. E. (2001). Augumentative and alternative communication for persons with autism: history, issues, and unanswered questions. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 16, 138-140.

 

AAC commentary

Since AAC is an independent area  in assistive technology, I need to separate AAC area from the review.

 A precise definition of AAC?

AAC is an area of inquiry and practice emphasizing “the supplementation or replacement of natural speech and/or writing using aided and/ or unaided symbols…” (p.524).

“What are the consequences of a child’s profound impairment in joint attention for an interventionist attempting to introduce a visual-based AAC system? ” (p.139, )

Individuals with autism have relatively stronger visual-spatial abilities (Koul, Schlosser, & Sancibrian). However, the relative strength of children with autism in visual-spatial abilities may be at least partly mitigated by a profound disturbance of joint attention skill development (Mundy, Sigman, & Kasari, 1990).

Clearly much remains to be done to measure the impact of impaired joint attention on children’s use of AAC system.

 

AAC Review?

ID41.Teaching daily living skills

Not really computer assisted learning…it’s more video modeling intervention!

Using CAI and the NRA to teach word identification

ID 65

Coleman-Martin, M. B., Heller, K. W., Cihak, D. F., & Irvine, K. L. (2005). Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabiliteis, 20, 80-90.

 

Three participants with cerebral palsy, autism, and brain injury from a stroke, who have severe speech impairment.

The target words were displayed either on index cards or on the computer using POWERPOINT software. During CAI, words were presented using the POWERPOINT software, which created a series of PowerPoint slides for each target word. Each slide had a visual and auditory component.

The first slide for each word begain by showing the student the entire word and encouraging her to slowlu say the word aloud as the word was slowly pronounced by the computer program.

The next slide showed the first phoneme of the target word in a dark color, and the study was instructed to say that sound in her head while the digitized voice said the sound aloud. Subsequent slides showed the following phonemes  presented in the dark color while the preceding phoneme remained on the screen but changed to a lighter color. For each phoneme, the digitized voice said the dark-colored sound aloud. Once each phoneme was presented, the entire word appeared on the screen in the dark color and the student was instructed to sound out the word slowly in her head without stopping between sounds while the digitized voice read the word slowly.

"Taking one step ahead and opening the world for our son"

ID 68.

Jaminia, Ali. (2001). Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 16, 2-5.

AliJamnia designed a computer system that worked for his son and helped him to make some cognitive growth.

He noted;

1. Children enjoy using the computer;

2. they prefer to work togethr with other children at the computer;

3. they develop a positive attitude toward the computer, as well as increased social interaction with the peer at the computer;

4. there is a correlation between increased language use and increased positive attitude and social interaction among the children who use the computer.

However, unfortunately, no systematic review has been done with children with autism on computer use.  We just assumed that computer assisted instruction favored learning of children with autism based on previous studies.

computer-based instruction reading for EBD

Blankenship, T. L., Ayres, K. M., & Langone, J.  (2005). Effects of computer-based cognitive mapping on reading comprehension for students with emotional behavior disorders. Journal of Special Education Technology, 20, 15-23.

 

 

• Why reading comprehension is important?
• Why educational software?  à Inspiration
• Definition of cognitive mapping

 

• This study was designed to evaluate the pairing of cognitive mapping and computer software on the reading comprehension of students with behavior disorders who struggle with reading comprehension.

 

 

• Where the breadth of published research on reading comprehension intervention strategies for students with learning disabilities is expansive, a literature search revealed a dearth of published studies about students with emotional behavior disorders and reading comprehension.

 

• Several reading comprehension strategies similar to cognitive mapping have been employed with students with disabilities. Story mapping, text structure strategies, summarization, and graphic organizers.

 

• Listed such studies in detail.

 

• Several studies have identified concept mapping, also described as semantic mapping, or as it is referred to in this study, cognitive mapping, as a way of improving the reading comprehension of poor readers.

 

• Listed several studies in detail.

à    Group design studies.

 

• Each of these studies indicated that cognitive mapping, was an effective tool for increasing reading comprehension of students with mild disabilities. Cognitive mapping is a strategy that has proven effective, regardless of the differences in content or use of supplemental mnemonics. Computer based instruction coupled with cognitive mapping may provide another powerful strategy for improving the reading comprehension of students with mild disabilities and allow these students to engage in a mainstream curriculum that relies heavily on independent reading. Therefore, evaluation of the effects of cognitive mapping software of reading comprehension of students with mild disabilities would expand the corpus of literature in reading comprehension, cognitive mapping, computer based instruction, and on the education of students with behavior disorders.

 

Method

Participants/Setting

Three 15-year old freshmen students, EBD, self-contained classroom. These students have a history of significant learning difficulties due to reading problems and behavioral issues when assigned independent content area work.

 

According to teacher reports and disciplinary records, these students exhibited difficulty working independently and sometimes had problems reading required content area material. Historically, when assigned independent work, these students were often off-task and such work often lead to more serious behavioral outbursts in an avoidance effort. Due these behavioral issues, the students primarily relied on teacher-led direct instruction within the self-contained environment for learning because independent work, such as silent reading was ineffective for them to learn new information. The students rarely read content material independently in an effort to glean content knowledge as problem behavioral was generally associated with such tasks. The ineffectiveness of independent reading was further evidenced through continual failure when placed in general education settings where teachers relied on students to gain content information through silent reading.

 

Materials

 

All materials used within the study were already accessible to teachers within the school district. Materials were not brought into the classroom to be part of the study.

 

Dependent variable

Twenty key concepts were identified for each chapter based on the format of the textbook and the publisher’s prescribed curriculum. From these two dependent variables were used to monitor student acquisition of the key concepts, make instructional decisions, and evaluate the efficacy of the intervention. The first dependent variable was the percentage of correct responses on the chapter tests. The students would receive a pretest of the chapter test before beginning intervention and posttest after they completed reading the chapter. The second dependent variable was the percentage of correct responses on chapter quizzes that students took each day after reading.  

 

Independent variable

The independent variable was the student’s use and design of cognitive maps on the computer while reading the text.

Students learned to use the INspiration software to map text by watching a demonstration of the software and then through guided practice. The teacher modeled how to create maps and then tutored the students through the process. Once they had practiced using the software and learned how to create a one-page map including all of the pertinent information, they were judged to be proficient ay creating cognitive maps.

 

 

Design

A  modified multiple-probe design across behaviors was used to establish experimental control. The behaviors were the response of three students to three different chapters in a text. By selecting a multiple-probe across behaviors rather than across participants, each student was allowed to work at his/her own pace without regard to the progress of other participants.

 

Procedures

Baseline procedures. The chapter test was administered before the student began reading the chapter and again the student had completed the entire chapter. After reading each day, students took chapter quizzes that measured the same material as the chapter tests. These were administered orally toe ach student until the student established a stable or declining trend in correct responding over at least three sessions indicating that the student was not gaining knowledge without intervention.

 

Intervention procedures. The students had only 20 minutes to complete their reading and mapping. If they did not finish in the allotted time, the teacher stopped the students and moved the class to the next part of the day’s lesson, the teacher was available to answer student questions or concerns during the entire period, but did not interfere or answer content questions in order to ensure the students were learning from the reading and mapping process.

 

When the student completed his or her reading or at conclusion of a 20-minute reading segment, the student took chapter quizzes, all 20 key concepts were probed daily in the chapter quizzes and the student was able to move to the next reading section if he or she correctly answer 80% of the questions concerning material they had already read. If the student did not respond correctly to at least 80% of the questions covering material they had already read, the student had to reread that section of material the following day and again try to answer at least 80% of the questions correctly for the material they read.

 

Once the participants had read the entire chapter and could answer 80% of the chapter quiz questions correctly, they took the corresponding chapter test. Upon demonstration of mastery o n the Chapter Test, students began the next chapter of reading.

 

 

Discussion

The student all benefited from the computer-based cognitive-mapping strategy. They learned the assigned material and they were able to do this while working the material independently. The results of this study support two primary conclusions. First, students with behavior disorders who previously had difficulty successfully engaging in independent learning activities can use cognitive mapping to improve the retention of the information they read. Second, the power of computer-based, cognitive-mapping software offers a viable aid for student to create cognitive maps.

motivational deficits in autism

Koegel & Mentis (1985) reviewed the literature of motivation in childhood autism and found out several consistent results.

 

First, children’s motivation decreased to extremely low levels when they worked on tasks that they did not complete correctly. However, when the children were prompted to keep responding until they had completed the tasks correctly, their motivation to respond to those tasks was markedly increased.  The strong benefit of computer assisted learning is that it prompts students to keep responding until they had completed the tasks correctly.

 

The low motivation demonstrated by children with autism can be increased in a setting where the control is shared by the child and clinician and where the child is given a choice regarding the selection of materials, activities, and topics.

 

à Child has a control over the computer use.

attention deficits in autism

Attention function and dysfunction in autism. Allen & Courchesne (2001). 

 

Autistic individuals display a wide range of attentional abilities and deficits across the many domains of attention function, including selective, sustained, spatial, and shifting attention operations.

 

One being that attentional abnormality likely contribute to many of the clinical features of autism. For example, overly focused attention might contribute to the development of autistic person’s restricted pattern of interests or activities.

 

This is not to say that attentional impairment is a core deficit in this disorder. However, impairments of attention would be expected to place autistic children at a disadvantage when they are learning and developing other social, language and cognitive skills.

 

Thus, while attentional impairments surely result from abnormalities in brain function, certain arttentional strengths may have an abnormal physiological basis as well.

 

Selective attention:

In the early 1970s, Lovas and colleagues demonstrated that children with autism responded to a restricted environmental stimuli, suggesting that their attention was overly focused or “overselective”.

 

While clinical observation and empirical investigation both support the phenomenon of stimulus overselctiviry there exsit context in which an autistic person may actually appear to have an abnormally board focus of attention. For example, individuals with autism often tend to be more distractible than normal suggesting that their attention may in fact be underselective (Burack…)

 

Depending on the context, individuals with autism may have an abnormally narrow or abnormally broad focus of attention.

Whether an attentional focus is small and overselctive or inefficiently broad and underselctive may depend upon the presence of absence of paretal lobe abnormality.

 

Supernormal attention (Plaisted et al.)

Based on  the fact that autistic patients show poor generalization of learning from a training context to novel situations, they hypothesized autistic individuals must differ in their ability to process common versus unique features, unique features being processed well, while common features are processed poorly.

 

The ability to detect unique items is enhanced in autism.

 

Pascualvaca and colleagues (1998) have recently shown that autistic individuals are not impaired on a digit cancellation task, a common neuropsychological measure of focused or selective attention.

 

It is possible to elicit selective attention performance that is within normal limits or even superior to normal. Such a narrow spotlight of attention may actually be an advantage; an autistic individual with a narrow spotlight of attention will be less distracted by similar stimuli that fall outside of the spotlight.

 

A focus of attention varies among autistic individuals.

 

Sustained attention:

 

Studies support that notion that individuals with autism are not impaired in their ability to sustain attention. However, anyone who has experience working with autistic individuals will confirm that they do in fact have difficulty sustaining attention to certain tasks or activities.

 

Garreston, fein, and Waterhouse

Task difficulty did not differentially affect performance in autistic and normal control groups, which argues against a general impairment of sustained attention. Instead the only group difference was seen in the slow/social condition, wherein autistic children performed significantly poorer than normal controls and significantly poorer than their own performance in the tangible condition, suggesting an abnormal response to social reinforcement. Thus it may be the case that clinical reports of impaired maintenance of attention are due to motivational as opposed to ability-related factors.

 

While highlighting the importance of accounting for motivational factors when designing and interpreting neurobehavioral investigations of autism. Garretson et al,’ study also points to a possible abnormal interaction in autism between those neural systems mediating attention and those mediating motivation and the response to reward.

 

Spatial attention: the rapid orienting of attentional resources

 

Harris et al. –children with autism were on average 31% slower to detect validly cued targets preceded by short delays than those preceded by long delays.

 

The question of what role motor impairment has in the slowing responses.

 

Attention is an anticipatory operation; it is the enhancement of neural responsiveness in advance of relevant sensory information.

 

 

 

Shifting attention:

 

Casey et al. (1993) examined the continuous shifting of attentional set in

autistic savants. These authors used a visual discrimination task in which the attribute to which subjects had to attend in order to respond correctly was varied on a trial-by-trial basis.  Autistic and control subjects did not differ on this task in terms of accuracy or speed of response. It should be noted,

however, that subjects were given as much time as they needed to attend to the stimuli before determining the correct choice and executing a response. Therefore, the key aspect of the shift attention deficit, i.e. slowness of shifting, was not probed by this study.

 

In what may have been a demonstration of the implications of the shift attention deficit in a more ” world” setting, Swettenham et al. (63) examined the spontaneous selection and shifting of gaze direction during

a finite period of free play in very young children (i.e., approximately 20 months of age) suspected of having autism (as autism cannot be diagnosed definitively at this young age). Compared to normal and developmentally

delayed children, the children with probable autism demonstrated less spontaneous attention shifting overall. They were also more prone to shifting gaze between objects than between people. This latter finding may have

reflected avoidance of social stimuli or of more complex visual stimuli (63).

 

Pascualvaca and colleagues suggested that the

pattern of performance across the three tasks in their study

reflected autistic subjects’ ability to “shift their attention

continuously” and their difficulty shifting attention when

“already engaged in a particular activity.” As they pointed

out, this is consistent with the shift attention experiments

conducted in our laboratory, wherein subjects were

required to attend to one modality for a period of time

before they had to shift attention rapidly to a different

modality in order to detect target stimuli. As for the

discrepant performances on the two set-shifting tasks, this

appears to be consistent with the demonstration by

Garretson, Fein, and Waterhouse (76; see above) that

attention performance in autistic individuals benefits from

tangible but not from social reinforcement. That is, the

tangible visual and auditory effects of the computerized

task aided performance, while the standard social

reinforcement of the WCST (i.e., the examiner telling the

subject whether he is correct or incorrect) did not.

 

Tantible visual & auditory effects of the computerized task aided performance while the standard social reinforcement did not.

 

The Pascualvaca et al. study also demonstrated,

as in our shifting attention experiments, that autistic

individuals appear to have no difficulty shifting attention

when given adequate time. This is a very important point,

because the shifting attention findings have frequently been misinterpreted in both the autism and cerebellum literature.

The fact that rapid shifting of attention is impaired in

autism and in patients with lesions of the neocerebellum

does not mean that shifting attention is a core deficit of

autism, nor does it mean that shifting attention is a

fundamental function of the cerebellum. As eloquently

stated by Pascualvaca et al., the “deficit is not in shifting

attention per se, but may be secondary to difficulties in the

coordination and modulation of attentional resources, as

well as in the activating effects of motivation.” (64, p. 477).

Likewise, we suggest that the shifting attention task is

simply a useful probe of a more general impairment in the

rapid and accurate deployment or adjustment of neural

resources, be they motor, cognitive, or affective. In the

case of shifting attention, this impairment leads to

difficulties coordinating, modulating, and activating

attentional resources, and in the Pascualvaca et al. study,

perhaps motivational resources as well.

 

Summary

 

In sum, an examination of autistic performance

across a wide range of attentional operations reveals a

unique pattern of strengths and weaknesses in this

population. Individuals with autism tend to show an

abnormal distribution of attentional resources across space

that is a function of their parietal lobe defect. They are also

impaired when they must rapidly re-allocate their

attentional resources to new spatial locations or to new

target modalities, and a variety of evidence points to the

role of cerebellar abnormality in this deficit. When

attention is sustained on a single location (i.e., not

distributed across spatial locations or rapidly shifted

between locations or modalities), the performance of

autistic individuals is not impaired in most cases.

 

(rationale for computer ) 

The one

instance in which autistic subjects do perform abnormally

on such a task is the context in which performance is

manipulated by social reinforcement. In this case, autistic

subjects perform worse than normal controls. This

abnormal response to social reinforcement has been shown

in other contexts, and may reflect an abnormal interaction

between frontal regions subserving sustained attention and

limbic regions mediating the response to reward. However,

it is also possible that this is yet another reflection of

cerebellar abnormality in autism. The cerebellum is known

to be involved in association learning (65-69), and we have

proposed that it learns such associations so that it can

generate moment-to-moment predictions about which

neural systems will be needed in upcoming moments,

allowing it to effect the preparatory enhancement of neural

responsiveness in these systems. The cerebellum is known

to have rich connections with limbic circuits (70), and the

abnormal response to social reinforcement may reflect

cerebellar impairment in the learning of associations and

the subsequent provision of preparatory enhancement for

limbic regions responding to motivational information.

 

 

considered regarding the social reinforcement findings is

the possibility that the processing of socially reinforcing

information requires a very distracting shift of attention to a

person in a different location from the to-be-attended

stimuli. The distraction of responding to social reinforcers

and attempting to process such a complex (human) stimulus

would interrupt a task much more severely than would a

more “tangible” reinforcer such as a pretzel or a penny.

This would have less to do with motivation and more to do

with attention dysfunction. à computer use!

 

8.2. Implications for behavior and treatment

 

an autistic

child may learn to identify his father’s face not by the overall

appearance, but rather by some more focal feature (e.g., a

chipped tooth). Such limited recognition might be

detrimental to the natural formation of parent-child

attachment, a form of autistic socioemotional deficit that can

be particularly distressing to families of autistic children.

The inability to orient attention rapidly and

accurately to positions in space places autistic children at a

serious disadvantage when learning to comprehend the

complexities of the world. Slow and inaccurate orienting

of attention prevents one from taking in every element of

the continuous flow of information occurring in one’s

environment. The result is a fragmented sense of the world

which, among other things, will impede individuals from

learning about causal relationships and make the sharing of

attention with other individuals difficult if not impossible

 

Just as the inability to move attention rapidly and

accurately among spatial targets is detrimental to

development, so too is the inability to shift attention rapidly

and accurately between sensory modalities. The social

world is made up of a complex and ongoing sequence of

often-unpredictable visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli.

Unless one is capable of rapidly shifting attention among

these various modalities, information will surely be missed

and thus not learned by the developing child.

 

impairment in the autistic child’s ability to use

reward-related information to modulate attentional resources

can undermine many of the standard principles by which we

teach and learn. Therefore, successful interventions will

grow out of the careful planning of individualized programs

that capitalize on the attentional strengths and bypass the

weaknesses of individuals with autism.

Golstein, Johnson, & Minshew (2001).  Attentional processes in autism

 

Individuals with high functioning autism demonstrated that the major dysfunctions relative to controls are on those measures of attention that require cognitive flexibility or utilize psychomotor speed, as opposed to accuracy or span of apprehension. 

 

The evidence for impaired shifting of attention in autism appears to be associated with various aspects of complex information processing such as planning decision strategies or concept formation, and not with perceptual shifting of focus of the type that may be mediated by cerebellar function (Courchesne et al., 1993).

 

These findings indicate that the well-established cognitive deficits and their associated with autism are not the result of a failure to incorporate information or to sustain concentration or to resist distraction.

 

Thus, it appears that if individuals with autism do appear to have attentional deficits, they would be at the conceptual level, perhaps involving executive abilities and monitoring of novel information ( Ozonoff, 1995b; Ozonoff et al., 1994)

 

 

 

Attention deficits in autism

 

Daisy M. Pascualvaca,1,3 Bryan D. Fantie,1,2 Maria Papageorgiou,1 and Allan F. Mirsky1\

 

Attentional Capacities in Children with Autism: Is

There a General Deficit in Shifting Focus?

 

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Vol. 28, 467-478, 1998

 

Results of published studies suggest that children

with autism do not have any marked difficulties

in sustaining their focus of attention to

repetitive, predictable stimuli (Garretson, Fein, &

Waterhouse, 1990). In contrast, these children

often have difficulty shifting their focus of attention.

This difficulty has been demonstrated with

neuropsychological measures such as the Wisconsin

Card Sorting Test (WCST; Ozonoff, 1995;

Ozonoff, Pennington, & Rogers, 1991; Prior &

Hoffmann, 1990) as well as with reaction time

tasks (Courchesne, 1995; Courchesne, Akshoomoff,

Townsend, & Saitoh, 1995; Courchesne et al,

1994a, 1994b).

 

To clarify this deficit in shifting attention,

we devised two computerized tasks that

make demands upon two different aspects of shifting

attention. In the first task, the children had to

decide whether some feature of three targets was

either the same or different, and therefore, had to

change their focus of attention continuously between

the features of these stimuli. We designed

the second task to resemble the WCST whereby

the children had to shift their attention after having

focused on a specific target feature for some

time.

 

We were also interested in determining

whether the children’s difficulties in attention tests

were secondary to decreased motivation. There is

considerable evidence to indicate that tangible rewards

facilitate learning (Lovaas, 1977, 1993) and

attentional performance (Garretson et al., 1990) in

children with autism. Despite their susceptibility to

various reinforcement modalities, we hypothesized

that if these children had a real core deficit in attention,

increasing their motivation should not be

sufficient to compensate for such deficit.

Computer-based reading for young children with disabilities

Lee & Vail (2005). Computer-based reading instruction for young children with disabilities.

 

In an effort to find the most effective strategies for teaching reading, researchers examined a variety of systematic prompting procedures. Several effective teaching strategies include: constant or a progressive time delay, simultaneous prompting, system of least prompt, or stimulus fading procedure. Among the procedures, the constant time delay procedure has been shown to be the most effective and efficient (Browder & Xin, 1998).

 

Independent variable

The intervention program, Word Wizard, was developed.

At the beginning of session: the participant’s name and selected time interval were entered.

The target words were selected from Dolch word lists and high frequency words lists in the school district.

5-second constant time-delay procedure.

Descriptive verbal praise for every correct response.

 

A multiple probe design across four word sets, replicated by four participants (Tawney & Gast, 1984) was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the computer program for teaching sight word recognition.

 

Generalization procedures

Incidental learning procedures