Strategies for teaching common core to teens with autism show promise

Credit: High school classroom in Newark, Delaware, public domain image, courtesy of Wikimedia

Scientists at UNC's Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG) report that high school students with autism can learn under Common Core State Standards (CCSS), boosting their prospects for college and employment.

Newly published recommendations from FPG's team also provide strategies for educating adolescents with autism under a CCSS curriculum.

Veronica P. Fleury

"The number of students with autism who enter high school settings continues to grow," said Veronica P. Fleury, lead author and postdoctoral research associate with FPG's Center on Secondary Education for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (CSESA).

"Many educators may find that they're not prepared to adapt their instruction to meet both state standards and the diverse needs of these students."

In 2010, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers released the CCSS for English and mathematics in an effort to better prepare students for college and careers.

According to Fleury, the greater demand for a technologically advanced workforce also makes academic skills now even more essential for high school graduates.

"But the college enrollment of people with autism is among the lowest for all categories of disabilities," Fleury said.

"In addition, less than 40% of the population with autism is employed, and most of those with jobs only work part-time, without benefits."

However, she said that academic performance in high school plays an important role in opportunities for a college education and employment.

Yet, while the CCSS outlines expectations of what educators should teach, it provides no guidance on how to teach these skills to students with or without autism.

Fleury believes the most effective high school instruction requires understanding the complex profile of students with ASD, who possess both strengths and weaknesses.

People with autism have some social deficits and may process language at a slower rate, she said, while many also have enhanced visual processing.

Some may have difficulty learning to make calculations, but others are mathematically gifted.

"It's extremely hard to draw general conclusions about academic performance for these students," Fleury said. "But adolescents with autism often do have difficulties comprehending texts, and many find writing a burdensome task."

Fluery added that work in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) are replacing manufacturing jobs and may provide viable opportunities for many people with ASD.

She said people with autism often gravitate to these fields in college, highlighting the need to equip them as high school students with skills that will enable them to compete and achieve.

"While the very structure of high school poses challenges for students with autism, being able to anticipate and understand activities, schedules, and expectations can improve their ability to respond to classroom demands," she said. "Establishing routines and creating written schedules also helps."

In a new article in Remedial and Special Education, Fleury and her co-authors recommended several strategies to educate students with ASD effectively, including exposing them to assignments before presenting the work in class.

The researchers also noted a variety of techniques for delivering the highly explicit instruction that teenagers with autism require, such as teaching mnemonic devices for remembering steps in a task.

"High school students with ASD also need ample opportunities to practice skills across settings throughout the school day," she said. "And teaching them to monitor their own behavior can help them to use their skills in a variety of settings."

Fleury added that because there is a strong link between social and academic skills, new research should focus on developing interventions for students with autism that can address both areas of need together.

"We know that when students with autism receive appropriate instruction and support, many of them are capable of learning academic content that is aligned with state standards, AND better academic performance often leads to a more successful outcome after high school." she said.

Can Toys help develop Science and Technology (STEM) skills in children?

One of the hot topics on social media this holiday season is finding gifts that can help children, especially girls, develop science- and engineering-related skills.

Beth Holloway, director of the Women in Engineering Program at Purdue University, says toys that help children figure out how to turn their ideas into reality - toys that let them design and build something, for instance - are a great first step in inspiring them to consider a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) career.

"Toys like that will help children realize that they can make an impact on the world through their ideas," she says.

As for girls in particular, Holloway says they should have a range of toys and experiences.

"Parents need to provide girls with toys that indulge their feminine side but also those that allow them to feel the sense of accomplishment that comes from designing and building something," she says.

"Those accomplishments will encourage them to continue to stretch their imaginations."

Holloway says research shows that girls tend to become interested in what they are confident that they are good at doing.

STEM-inspired toys can help foster that confidence in designing and building while reinforcing their existing interests.

For ideas on STEM-related toys, Holloway suggests the websites www.amightygirl.com/ and www.modernparentsmessykids.com

Animal Computer Interaction: Technology to help dogs assist humans in the home

Dr Clara Mancini at The Open University talks about the Animal-Computer Interaction team and their collaboration with the charity Dogs for the Disabled to design dog-friendly technologies which will make it easier for dogs to assist their humans in the home.

Dr Clara Mancini

Assistance dogs perform a range of daily tasks, such as operating light switches and door handles, but domestic technology is designed for humans rather than animals, making life harder for the dogs and their owners. So, a new animal-centered design perspective is needed.

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Links to Understanding Special Needs and Technology

Here are four links to understanding special needs and technology:

• Here’s an article on iPads and visually-impaired students
• Here’s another on Special Ed iPads apps for reading and writing
• Here’s Internet4Classroom’s list of resources for Exceptional Children
• Here’s Jeannette Van Houten’s iEvaluate Apps for Special Needs–a checklist for evaluating apps for special needs students

If your school budget allows for only a limited number of apps and programs this year, choose the ones that will fill out your special needs collections. 

Here are some wonderful apps/websites to use with your special needs students:

• Babakus–a math app for students with dyscalculia or math disability
• One-handed keyboard--a standard desktop keyboard that allows those with limited or no use of one hand to continue typing
• Five-finger typist–self-paced typing exercises for the one-handed
• iPads for autism–the phenomenal impact of the iPad on communication abilities of the autistic.
• Speech and language apps from Mobile Education Store–apps to assist children with higher function autism
• How to make your own assistive technology devices
• iPads and Special Education–a very detailed list of a variety of apps from all different subjects.

Technology for Teachers: Three Tools for Creating infographics

Easel.ly provides a canvas on which you can build your own infographic by dragging and dropping pre-made design elements.

You can use a blank canvas or build upon one of Easel.ly's themes. If Easel.ly doesn't have enough pre-made elements for you, you can upload your own graphics to include in your infographic.

Your completed infographic can be exported and saved as PNG, JPG, PDG, and SVG files. Watch the video for an overview of Easel.ly.

Infogr.am is an online tool for creating interactive charts and graphs. Soon you will be able to create interactive infographic posters on Infogr.am too.

There are four basic chart types that you can create on Infogr.am; bar, pie, line, and matrix.

Each chart type can be edited to use any spreadsheet information that you want to upload to your Infogr.am account.

The information in that spreadsheet will be displayed in your customized chart. When you place your cursor over your completed chart the spreadsheet information will appear in small pop-up window.

Your Infogr.am charts can be embedded into your blog, website, or wiki.

Visual.ly makes it easy to make your own Infographics from Twitter hashtags.

To create an infographic with Visual.ly just sign-in with your Twitter ID, enter a hashtag that you want to see visualized, and select an infographic template.

Deletion of a 27-gene cluster on chromosome 16, causes Autism-like features

Scientists at Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory (CSHL) have discovered that one of the most common genetic alterations in autism, deletion of a 27-gene cluster on chromosome 16, causes autism-like features.

By generating mouse models of autism using a technique known as chromosome engineering, CSHL Professor Alea Mills and colleagues provide the first functional evidence that inheriting fewer copies of these genes leads to features resembling those used to diagnose children with autism.

The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the early online edition during the week of October 3.

"Children normally inherit one copy of a gene from each parent. We had the tools to see whether copy number changes found in kids with autism were causing the syndrome," explains Mills. In 2007, Professor Michael Wigler, also at CSHL, revealed that some children with autism have a small deletion on chromosome 16, affecting 27 genes in a region of our genomes referred to as 16p11.2.

The deletion, which causes children to inherit only a single copy of the 27-gene cluster is one of the most common copy number variations (CNVs) associated with autism.

"The idea that this deletion might be causing autism was exciting," says Mills. "So we asked whether clipping out the same set of genes in mice would have any effect."

After engineering mice that had a chromosome defect corresponding to the human 16p11.2 deletion found in autism, Mills and her team analyzed these models for a variety of behaviors, as the clinical features of autism often vary widely from patient to patient, even within the same family.

"Mice with the deletion acted completely different from normal mice," explains Guy Horev, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Mills laboratory and first author of the study. These mice had a number of behaviors characteristic of autism: hyperactivity, difficulty adapting to a new environment, sleeping deficits, and restricted, repetitive behaviors.

Interestingly, mice that had been engineered to carry an extra copy, or duplication, of the 16p11.2 region did not have these characteristics, but instead, had the reciprocal behaviors. For each behavior, the deletion had a more dire consequence than the duplication, indicating that gene loss was more severe. This might explain why 16p11.2 duplications are detected much more frequently than deletions within the human population, and why patients with 16p11.2 deletions tend to be diagnosed earlier than those with duplications.

The mouse models also revealed a potential link between 16p11.2 deletion and survival, as about half the mice died following birth. Whether these findings extend to the human population might be answered by future studies that investigate the link between this deletion and unexplained cases of infant death.

The researchers also used MRI to identify specific regions of the brain that were altered in the autism models, revealing that eight different parts of the brain were affected. The group is now working to identify which gene or group of genes among the 27 that are located within the deleted region is responsible for the behaviors and brain alterations observed.

"Alea Mills has created a valuable resource for everyone engaged in autism research. The technical skill is extraordinary in creating mouse models bearing a human genetic variant that has been associated with autism," says Dr. Gerald Fischbach, Director of Life Sciences and Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI).

Technology Review: Reading Baby Brains

Technology Review: Reading Baby Brains

Magnetoencephalography (MEG), a technology used to study brain function and to pinpoint diseased areas of the brain, capitalizes on the very weak magnetic fields created whenever a cluster of neurons fires at once.

A helmet, resembling a salon hair dryer, with 306 sensors hovers over the subject's head and detects where the magnetic pulses are occurring. Unlike magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines--which only show snapshots of data and require people to lie still inside a noisy, narrow tunnel while subjected to a powerful, rotating magnetic field--the MEG is pin-drop quiet and open, allowing subjects to interact with their surroundings. The resulting data can show researchers precisely where activity is occurring in the brain in real time.

A maelstrom of neural connections develop in a child's brain during the first five years of life. Understanding how interconnected circuits develop, and how babies think, could lead to a host of new insights into everything from autism to language acquisition. But gathering such information has been tricky: infants can't be ordered to stay motionless, which is required for most advanced neuroimaging techniques. Now a system that works in concert with existing imaging machinery can account for head movement and, for the first time, let researchers see detailed activity in an active baby's brain.

to study babies that were wide awake and socially engaged, researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Studies (I-LABS) worked with Helsinki-based medical device company Elekta to create a "head-positioning" system remarkably similar to GPS. Scientists strap a soft nylon cap to the baby's head.

The cap has four embedded coils, each of which emits a high-frequency wavelength indicating its relative position at all times. As the hardware system tracks the skull's movement, the software interprets the results and merges them with MEG-sensor data.

To read the full article follow this link