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

Your Mind-Wandering Is Robbing You of Happiness

“The main thing is to get what little happiness there is out of life in this wartorn world,” Clare Boothe Luce advised her young daughter, “because ‘these are the good old days’ now.” And yet most of us are conditioned to escape into the past, into the future, into our to-do lists — to wander off away from the present, even as we chronicle the moment in real-time on various lifestreaming platforms.

If you’ve read any of these seven essential books on happiness or taken the sage advice of Jackson Pollock’s dad, the research findings from his Track Your Happiness project Matt Killingsworth shares in his TEDxCambridge talk will be of no surprise.

Still, there’s something grounding about the unequivocal empirical evidence of something most of us intuit on some level, often with great discomfort.

Strikingly enough, that mind-wandering is a cause rather than a consequence of unhappiness is at once jarring and heartening — it suggests that by training our minds to be more fully present, we’d be honing our capacity for happiness, something Eastern philosophy has long maintained.

But perhaps the most surprising and most commanding finding is that even when people’s minds wander off to pleasant things, they’re less happy than when they are fully present in the moment:

Science and Maths: Playing 'boys' games help Girls

The observation that males appear to be superior to females in some fields of academic study has prompted a wealth of research hoping to shed light on whether this is attributable to nature or nurture.

Although there is no difference in general intelligence between the sexes, studies over the past 35 years have consistently found that overall men do much better in tests of spatial ability than women.

This difference may have something to do with why there are still fewer women in tertiary education studying science, technology, engineering and math – all subjects where it helps to have good spatial ability.

More in-depth assessment, however, reveals that this might be an over-simplification of the facts.

A new review, published in Springer's journal Sex Roles, sheds light on one of the factors contributing to these gender differences in spatial ability, that of gender-roles.

Although children are born either male or female, individuals differ in their degree of masculine and feminine identification and endorsement of masculine and feminine gender roles.


The review was carried out by David Reilly and David Neumann from Griffith University in Queensland, Australia.

Reilly and Neumann note that studies in their review reported finding larger within-gender variations in spatial ability than between-gender.

This then led them to look more specifically at the data on variables within males and females which might be able to explain this.

The researchers analysed twelve studies which had looked specifically at one aspect of spatial ability, namely mental rotation, in high school pupils, college attendees and young adults.

Collectively these studies showed a significant association between masculinity and mental rotation performance for both men and women.

In other words, men and women with either a strong masculine or androgynous gender-identity fared better in mental rotation tasks.

The authors suggest that it is the considerable variation in the levels of typically masculine and feminine traits and behaviours, that children of the same sex develop, which account for the inter-gender variability.

Masculine identification leads to cultivation of mathematical and scientific skills whereas feminine identification facilitates verbal and language abilities.

These gender-roles are not mutually exclusive, with some children of both genders developing a healthy integration of both roles.

Development of spatial ability is refined through play and recreational activities, with traditionally masculine activities helping to promote development of spatial ability.

Therefore improving girls' performance in subjects which require good spatial ability may involve the deliberate inclusion of what are commonly seen as stereo-typically male activities into their daily lives, rather than encouraging sex-segregation of activities.

The authors conclude: "We have seen many changes in society's beliefs about gender equality in the intervening decades since Sharon Churnin Nash (Stanford University) proposed her gender-role mediation hypothesis of intellectual development in 1979.

However, for spatial ability at least, this association seems as relevant today as when the claim was first made."

More information: Reilly, D. and Neumann, D.L. (2013), Gender-role differences in spatial ability: a meta-analytic review, Sex Roles. DOI 10.1007/s11199-013-0269-0

Wake Up and Dream - Radiolab

Matt Kielty introduces us to Steve Volk, a city reporter in Philadelphia who, for decades, was plagued by a recurring nightmare.

It popped up whenever Steve was going through a stressful time, and it always played out exactly the same way but no matter how self-aware Steve was about his most current set of anxieties, and no matter how hard he tried to rationalize and explain away the dream...he couldn't make it stop.

Then one year, Steve started working on a book about topics at the edge of science, and along the way he stumbled into lucid dreaming.

Pretty soon, Steve was reading through old sleep studies conducted by a scientist named Stephen LaBerge, and he was starting to wonder if lucid dreaming might not be so near the fringe after all.

So he called up LaBerge's assistant and began training himself on a set of techniques that would eventually help him put his inner demon to bed.

Read more:
Fringe-ology, by Steve Volk
Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, by Stephen LaBerge

The Science of Lucid Dreaming - YouTube

Have you ever wanted to take control of your dreams? Now you can, with the science of how to lucid dream! With these simple steps, and a little practice, you'll soon experience sleep like never before.

David Byrne and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin Discuss Science and Music

David Byrne and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music, discuss the inner workings of music. Byrne’s new book, How Music Works, is an absolute must-read.

The conversation is part of SEED magazine’s Science Is Culture series, pairing artists and scientists to explore the intersection of science and society.

Inside of Chinese High Schools - An Exclusive Interview (Full) - YouTube

Many factors play into China's booming economy - one of which is its education. So, how do the Chinese do it? I found out through this interview with several students in two Chinese high schools. See the difference in the education of the other side of the world.

Motor Neurone Disease: New Insight about how it works

When we imagine how research results can change society or help us make new bounds in medical science we think of proving a hypothesis or cracking a code, but sometimes research that refutes a theory can be just as beneficial, as scientists can eliminate a hypothesis from the mix and save years of wasted-time investigating dead ends and a team of German researchers has just done exactly that.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the team refute a widely accepted hypothesis about a causative step in neuro-degenerative conditions.

These results deal specifically with animal models of human amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Motor Neurone Disease, but the findings also have implications for other neuro-degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's or Huntington's disease.

One of the ways neuro-degenerative diseases manifest themselves is in the loss of axons - essentially, the transmission lines for electrical signals in individual nerve cells - and synapses, the key sites for communication between them.

In the past, such damage has been attributed to deficits in the bi-directional transport of organelles, such as the intracellular power plants called mitochondria, along the axons of nerve cells.

The team, from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen (LMU), put these previously-held assumptions to the test in one of the most thorough tests carried out to date.

They used novel imaging techniques, with high resolution in both space and time, to observe changes in both axon morphology and organelle transport in several different animal models of ALS.

Their results show that transport deficits and axon degeneration can develop independently of each other, throwing into question the theory that one is a direct cause of the other.

They observed axonal organelle transport in living tissue in real time, and in a way that enabled them to track the movement of individual mitochondria, using a novel imaging approach that involves transgenic labelling.

They were also able to observe transport of another kind of organelle, endosome-derived vesicles. Several different animal models of ALS were investigated, all of which are based on human mutations associated with the disease.

One of the study authors, Professor Thomas Misgeld from the Institute of Neuroscience at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen, comments on their findings: 'We do think these insights have implications for other studies of ALS, or even studies of other neuro-degenerative diseases.

What our experiments really say is that it is not easy to develop faithful models of neuro-degenerative diseases.

So it might be worth spending more effort to get better animal models, as this is the only way forward for mechanistic studies, while always checking them against human pathology or human-derived cellular models.

In the meantime, it is probably prudent to work with several of the available models in parallel. Moreover, in more general biological terms, our results also speak to the relationship between axonal transport disruptions and degeneration - which might not be as tight as we assumed. Here we have a lot more to understand.'

The iPSoALS project brings together researchers from France, Germany, Israel and Sweden with the aim of better understanding ALS disease mechanisms.

For more information, please visit: Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM)

What is up with Noises? The Science and Mathematics of Sound, Frequency, and Pitch - YouTube

Mathemagician Vi Hart creates another brilliant stop-motion movie, this time exploring the science and mathematics of sound, frequency and pitch. From Pythagoras to the anatomy of the ear, Hart uses her signature playful hand-illustrations to reveal how simple mathematical ratios make pleasing melodies.

Steve Jobs and Alternative medicine - Cartoon fun

Read more cartoon fun at Ape not Monkey.com

Parental influence on children's feeding habits

As primary caregivers, parents are often believed to have a strong influence on children’s eating habits and behaviours. However, previous findings on parent-child resemblance in dietary intakes are mixed.

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health reviewed and assessed the degree of association and similarity between children’s and their parents’ dietary intake based on worldwide studies published since 1980. The meta-analysis is featured in the December issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

“Contrary to popular belief, many studies from different countries, including the United States, have found a weak association between parent-child dietary intake,” said Youfa Wang, MD, PhD, MS, lead author of the study and an associate professor with the Bloomberg School’s Department of International Health.

“This is likely because young people’s eating patterns are influenced by many complex factors, and the family environment plays only a partial role.

More attention should be given to the influence of the other players on children’s eating patterns such as that of schools, the local food environment and peer influence, government guidelines and policies that regulate school meals, and the broader food environment that is influenced by food production, distribution and advertising.”

He added, “Parents need to be better empowered to be good role models and help their children eat a healthy diet.”

More on this story at Science Blog

Neuropsychologia: Lateralised temporal order judgement (TOJ) in dyslexia

ScienceDirect - Neuropsychologia : Lateralized temporal order judgement in dyslexia

In this research study Temporal and Spatial attention deficits in dyslexia were investigated using a lateralised visual temporal order judgment (TOJ) paradigm. This allowed both sensitivity to temporal order and spatial attention bias to be measured.

Findings indicate that adult participants with dyslexia were significantly less sensitive to the temporal order of the stimuli than other adults who were not affected by dyslexia. But this study did not show a significantly different lateral bias.

However, the data indicated that performance on the TOJ task dissociated into at least three factors.

1) The first one loaded on trials with long Stimulus Onset Asynchronies (SOA) and was strongly correlated with full-scale IQ (FSIQ), and, while also correlated with both poor reading and with symptoms of attentional deficit disorder, was not specific to these.

2) The second factor loaded on trials with short SOAs in which the left stimulus was presented first. Low scores on this factor were associated with poor non-word reading accuracy, and factor scores accounted for variance in non-word reading accuracy that was not accounted for by either FSIQ or the presence of a phonological deficit.

This suggests that a “left mini-neglect” syndrome, also reported in attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), may directly contribute to poor non-word reading.

However, attention deficit symptoms loaded not only on this factor, but also on a third factor, representing on trials at short SOAs in which the first stimulus was presented in left hemifield.

This suggests that attentional deficit symptoms impaired temporal processing at short SOAs, regardless of the hemifield in with the stimuli were presented.

Conclusion
The study concludes that people with attention deficits (ADD) find a visual TOJ task difficult when the stimuli are presented rapidly. This is regardless of intelligence levels (FSIQ).

Also, where an attention deficit bias is present, non-word reading accuracy may be directly impaired. This will happen, even if there is no phonological deficit.

For further reading and more scientific papers on Temporal Order Judgement (TOJ) click on this link to Mendeley - Philosophy of the Mind

Dr Sally Ride - America's first woman in space

Dr. Sally Ride continues to encourage children to increase their awareness of Maths and Science in a world that has adopted technology as a provider of entertainment and communications.


Click on the picture to read more of her comments.