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Tero Toivanen

An Apple for the Students | By Marcia Kaye | University of Toronto Magazine - 3 views

www.magazine.utoronto.ca/...ildren-autism-ipad-marcia-kaye

autism students special needs ipad ipads

shared by Tero Toivanen on 30 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • The two-year study, which ended last December, found that within six weeks the devices boosted kids’ attention spans, raised their ability to identify pictured objects by 45 to 60 per cent, and improved communication skills in these mostly nonverbal children by 20 per cent.
  • A surprising bonus: students who had never been sociable were suddenly requesting an iPad to initiate an activity with another student.
  • McEwen suggests that the devices’ appeal may lie in their multisensory nature, with images and sound – and vibration (thanks to the addition of a downloadable app). She adds that the device’s voice app, which is always calm and unemotional, appeals to those who thrive on consistency, including many children with ASD.
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  • One boy in kindergarten who had always ignored green “yes” and red “no” boxes on paper responded instantly to the identical boxes on the screen.
  • The iPad’s larger screen is better suited to children with vision or fine-motor challenges, such as the blind six-year-old in a wheelchair who delights in moving his arm across the tablet to create his own music.
  • Tero Toivanen on 30 Apr 12
     
    Autistic children develop better communications skills when using iPads, researcher finds
Tero Toivanen

NeuroLogica Blog » Facilitated Communication Persists Despite Scientific Crit... - 0 views

theness.com/...s-despite-scientific-criticism

FC Facilitated Communication supported typing autism communication

shared by Tero Toivanen on 09 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Facilitated Communication (FC) is a technique for allegedly aiding those with communication impairment, such as some people with autism, to communicate through typing or pointing at a letter board. The idea is that some children have greater cognitive ability than is apparent through their verbal skills, but they lack the motor skills to type or write. The facilitator in FC is trained to hold and support their client’s hand, to help stabilize it, so that they can type out their thoughts.
  • FC was enthusiastically embraced by the special education community in the late 1980s and early 1990s but problems quickly emerged, namely the question of authorship – who is doing the communicating, the client or the facilitator?
  • The scientific evidence came down clearly on one side of that debate – it is the facilitator who is the author of the communication, not the client.
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  • A 2001 review by Mostert came to the same conclusion – that the evidence supports the conclusion that the facilitators are the authors of communication in FC.
  • The strategy here is obvious – studies that directly and objectively confront the key question, who is authoring the writing in FC, gave an answer proponents did not like. They therefore shifted to indirect inference which is more amenable to judgement and qualitative analysis so that the desired results can be manufactured.
  • FC continues to exist on the fringe of legitimate science, but continues to fool journalists, patient advocates, and even physicians.
  • It is sad that FC continues to survive despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it is not a legitimate method of communication, but rather an elaborate exercise in self-deception.  It is a useful example of how powerful and subtle self-deception can be, and also of the ways in which scientific evidence can be manipulated to generate a desired outcome.
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