Autism Teachers

1) Children have the opportunity to make choices throughout the teaching session.

2) Alternating between mastered tasks and novel ones.

3) The child’s attempts are reinforced as are his/her accurate responses.

Current research into strategies for children with ASD indicates that the most efficient and effective interventions for these children include the following characteristics: (a) attention to student motivation, (b) teaching the student to respond to a variety of cues, (c) self-instruction procedures, and (d) teaching the student to learn through initiating to others (Koegel et al., 2001). These are known as pivotal areas of instruction for individuals with ASD and make up an approach called Pivotal Response Intervention (PRI).

Children with autism who received hyperbaric treatment at 1.3 atm and 24% oxygen for 40 hourly sessions had significant improvements in overall functioning, receptive language, social interaction, eye contact, and sensory/cognitive awareness compared to children who received slightly pressurized room air. Trial Registration: clinicaltrials.gov NCT00335790

A new paper from Eric Fombonne is in electronic print at the journal Pediatric Research.

The title is ‘Epidemiology of pervasive developmental disorders’

Combining all these categories together Fombonne presents a prevalence of 60-70/10,000.

A study published this week by Patricia Howlin of King’s College, London, reinforces this point. It suggests that as many as 30% of autistic people have some sort of savant-like capability in areas such as calculation or music.

Francesca Happé of King’s College, London, is one of them. As she observes, obsessional interests and repetitive behaviours would allow someone to practice, albeit inadvertently, whichever skill they were obsessed by. Malcolm Gladwell, in a book called “Outliers” which collated research done on outstanding people, suggested that anyone could become an expert in anything by practising for 10,000 hours. It would not be hard for an autistic individual to clock up that level of practice for the sort of skills, such as mathematical puzzles, that many neurotypicals would rapidly give up on.

Simon Baron-Cohen, a doyen of the field who works at Cambridge University, draws similar conclusions. He suggests the secret of becoming a savant is “hyper-systematising and hyper-attention to detail”. But he adds sensory hypersensitivity to the list. His team have shown one example of this using what is known as the Freiburg visual acuity and contrast test, which asks people to identify the gap in a letter “c” presented in four different orientations. Those on the autistic spectrum do significantly better at this than do neurotypicals. That might help explain Dr Happé’s observations about coins and raindrops.

The phrase “further research is needed in this area” has become so hackneyed within autism research articles it deserves its own special symbol (might I suggest an emoticon of an extended palm).

The problem in autism research is not lack of data. The problem is lack of vision.