ACC devices for children with Autism

Challenging our belief systems regarding people with autism and AAC: Making the least harmful assumptions.

By: Joanne M. Cafiero

http://www.closingthegap.com/lib/pdf/2007/Apr-May/ATinDepthMay.pdf

This above article challenges practitioners to look at the way they assess children with autism as well as how AAC devices are being used. I began looking for an article by searching children and assistive technology. I came across this article and it was really interesting for me because I used to work with children with Fragile X syndrome and many of these children had a duel diagnosis of autism.

Interestingly, the article began by looking at recent numbers saying that mental retardation was present in 70-75 percent of individuals with ASD, as compared to a study in 1958 stating that 30 percent of individuals with ASD had mental retardation. The author believes that this gap can be attributed to many of the tests are language based and are not appropriate for a child with ASD, as well as many symptoms of autism mask their actual cognitive performance. Greenspan (1992) proved this by showing that half of the children with ASD have difficulty in motor planning meaning that they cannot show what they actually know. I was very surprised to find that if a child has challenging behaviors, some practitioners would not introduce them to AAC devices until these behaviors were under control. I believe that everyone has a right for the means necessary to improving their everyday life. I worked with a little boy once that was not able to communicate, and once he was able to use an AAC device to communicate, his challenging behaviors actually decreased. The author also cautioned the use of timelines (ie. If this does not work in two weeks, we will no longer use it). I think that this is an important point because of the goals that need to be accomplished. Everyone is a different learner and progress at their own speed. The author really stressed making the least harmful assumptions, believing that a student may be more cognitively or communicatively able than they are performing on a standardized test. Once we are able to do this, we can open the doors to possibilities for these children, and not hinder them because they do not have a high enough developmental score.

When working with children with Fragile X, I had to perform a developmental assessment on each child. I always hated giving the results back to the parents because I knew that they were more capable of things and just were not able to perform it when I asked. I hated counting a “no response” as incorrect because I really did not know if they knew it or not but that was how the test was designed. The parents had a really hard time seeing the “numbers”, and wanted to prove to me that their child could do more. Even more, I hated to think that this number would actually hinder this child from opportunities. I think that I was really forced to look outside the box and begin looking at each individual child and their capabilities instead of assigning them a number. I think that many times society is too fixed on assigning numbers to intelligence instead of looking at individual strength and weaknesses to improve their quality of life.