From their announcement:
School districts nationwide are challenged to keep pace with the complex needs of a growing autism population. This webinar will define 7 Key Components that research and practitioners have identified as necessary to effectively support students with autism.

It will provide a framework for district leaders to allocate resources, for teachers to coordinate direct services, and for parents to advocate, all in an effort to improve supports for students on the autism spectrum.

Join Jamie Pagliaro, Co-Creator of Rethink Autism & Former Executive Director, NY Center for Autism Charter School, for this presentation. Click below to register:

Thursday, August 4, 2011 at 2 PM EDT

These folks are both good at what they do and care about our kids. If you’re new to this and starting to learn how to evaluate programs, or your child is moving to a new environment, I’m convinced it will be worth your time.

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Registration is now open for Augcomm New Jersey, a forum on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for parents and professionals.

Expert presenters from Eden Family of Services, Disability Rights New Jersey, The Boggs Center and the College of New Jersey will offer process-oriented advice on funding, assessment, AAC in the classroom, parent/professional collaboration in implementing high-tech and low-tech AAC solutions and other key topics.

Come and network with parents, speech therapists, special education advocates and others with a stake in helping non-verbal people to communicate effectively.

For updates on this information-packed event and a quick video of AAC in action, visit the Facebook event page.

To register, go here: http://augcommnj.eventbrite.com

Need some flyers for your school district? Just ask Eric.
Questions? Send him a note or tweet.

Thanks for your support; I’ll post updates at the WRT blog.

Seriously? They’re going to change the rules because the schools are failing? Isn’t that exactly the point of NCLB in the first place? Standardized testing that couldn’t be tweaked, sidestepped, or BS’d into meaninglessness?

And redefining “proficient?” Are you kidding me? There’s a specific reference to a state that redefined “proficient” in a subject to increase the pass rate. What’s next here? 2+2= (any answer from 3 to 5?)

The funny thing, the tragic thing I suppose, is that the constant redefinition (always downward, of course) is exactly what happens to special ed students when schools fail to meet goals they set in advance. This “facing reality” is vastly more common with teachers and schools and districts that don’t know what they’re doing and don’t care. Those that care make changes. Those that know what they’re doing make changes.

This article on NCLB explains exactly why my take on special ed at this point is that it’s all about performance management. Goals are relatively easy to set, the pace should be adjusted on a student by student basis, and then it’s a matter of performance management to figure out what’s going on. Are there organic deficits in the child that limit learning pace or ability that were not known in advance? Maybe some element of adjustment is appropriate, such as when my son’s behavior took a six-month detour into extreme silliness and interfered with his overall learning during that period. I couldn’t imagine holding the school or the district responsible for that.

But when a kid has a 100 IQ, there shouldn’t be a lot of excuses for maintaining, and eventually increasing, pace of learning. Lots of data can solve all the objections that are running through the heads of the people who don’t want to be held accountable for this right now — comparing apples to oranges, in terms of kids and learning objectives, being the main source of objections. But just because things are difficult is no reason not to do them. My son doesn’t have a choice; neither do I. Neither should our schools, not if they want to regain the position of authority and trust they once had in America.

My younger son will be starting kindergarten in the fall. I have no illusions that there will be far less management, even in terms of goals for the year, than for my son on the spectrum. But our district is great on the special ed side; I feel like the people I work with care about my son, I feel like they care that he makes improvements, and I feel like that care isn’t motivated solely by eventually making his program cheaper (although I would be fine with motivating good behavior with monetary savings!).

What are your experiences with general education goals and objectives? Do teachers look at you cross-eyed when you talk about such things?

Yes, my old iPad doesn’t have a camera, but the accessibility of these tools to my Dylan is just amazing. I’ve started to take nearly every idea for a program and think about how it could be legitimately — meaning better, simpler, more generalized, automatically data tracking & graphing — be implemented with these tools.

Thanks, Steve. Maybe you knew this, or maybe you just had faith. But still, thanks.

This post questions the wisdom of using rewards to encourage desired behavior, namely eating vegetables. It caught my eye for lots of reasons:

1. School’s been expanding my older son’s menu for months
2. I’ve been using the same techniques on my younger neurotypical son
3. My family adopted ABA as our primary method of helping Dylan after a research review yielded no reliable support for any other technique

So, seeing someone question the efficacy of a fundamental ABA tool, positive reinforcement, seems a little funny. But as my readers know, I am a huge fan of this quote from Milton: “I will not praise a fugitive or cloistered virtue.”

In my mind, science is a method, not an answer. So I welcome any research that helps us figure out how to help kids like mine.

Oh, and of course the answer is that reinforcement improves behavior more than no reinforcement, and although focusing on eating vegetables without reinforcement improved behavior for a few months, after three months the un-reinforced kids showed no difference from before the experiment began. Put differently, failure to reinforce meant that the efforts lasted less than three months.

So reinforce, reinforce, reinforce desired behavior. It works on everyone.

Do you have a story about using ABA principles on your NT kids, or, for extra credit, coworkers or bosses? Share your stories in the comments!

(Thankfully, the district in which I live has some wonderful people working there, who make us feel like valued members of the community. It’s not like that everywhere.)

Here’s the clip:

Apparently this program has been heavily marketed to families like ours.

There is at least one lawyer looking into things, and I’ve agree to help him out. Here’s more information (PDF link) if you’re interested, or you can contact me here.

This Lifehacker article suggests that using a slightly more unusual font, such as Comic Sans MS or Bodoni MT, had 14% greater retention, even at different font sizes.

One group was given the lists in 16-point Arial pure black font, which is generally regarded to be easy and clear to read.

The other had the same information presented in either 12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale font or 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale.

The volunteers were distracted for 15 minutes, and then tested on how much they could remember.

Researchers found that, on average, those given the harder-to-read fonts actually recalled 14% more.

The original BBC article has a picture comparing the typefaces used in the Princeton study.

I think this would make a great master’s thesis project for an aspiring BCBA. The ease of changing fonts for new materials is so tiny that a 14% gain is literally like thousands of dollars of free therapy!

With as much detail as great therapists put into breaking down tasks, responses, prompts, SDs, reinforcement, motivation, and everything else that is concentrated into each teaching-learning interaction, why wouldn’t we now start paying attention to something a whole lot easier to fix?

I hope to see a standard on this develop over the next year here in Northern NJ.