Educational Interventions for Children with Developmental Disability including Autism

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Educational Interventions for Children with
Developmental Disability including Autism

• Faculty of Education
• Research Event
• 18 April 2008

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Located within the Krongold Elwyn Morey Centres

• The Krongold Centre provides
• psychological and guidance services for
  exceptional children and adolescents within the
  school context.
• training for Psychologists and Special Educators
• The Elwyn Morey Child Study Centre
• an early childhood early intervention centre.

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Core Objective

• To advance the evidence base regarding
  effective educational practice with children with
  developmental disability, including autism, and
  the implementation of such practice.

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Autism.

• Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder.
  This is a category of disorders in which many
  basic areas of infant and child psychological
  development are affected at the same time, and to
  a severe degree.
• Autistic disorder has three major hallmarks
• Impaired social interaction,
• impaired communication, and
• restricted, repetitive and stereotypical patterns
  of behaviour, interests, and activities.
• Incidence approx .06 of the population

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Current Best Practice

• Educational interventions

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Program for Students with Disabilities Fast Facts
Term 2 2007
Seven Disability Categories

Intellectual Disability

• Supports 3.2 of the government school
  population in approx 90 of schools
• Supports 17,298 students
• 7,658 students in special schools
• 9,640 students in regular schools
• Six levels of funding
• Level 1 5,017 - Level 6 38,295
• iv) Total budget in 2006-07 359.4m

ID
Severe Language Disorder
SLD
Autistic Spectrum Disorder
ASD
Physical Disability
PD
Hearing Impairment
HI
Visual Impairment
VI
Severe Behaviour Disorder
SBD

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PSD Categories and Expenditure
proportion of expenditure by (2007)
proportion by student numbers (2007)
9.2
6.5
4.2
4.4
3.4
0.5
4.5
1.3
0.6
63.6
68.5
1.3
17.2
14.2
NB Student Numbers are EFT Rounded
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Growth in Autism (2000-2007)
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• Can be a substantially disabling condition
• for the child with autism
• that childs family
• and early childhood centre / school
• the community (long term)

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Current Context

• Legislative and attitudinal changes
• Changing patterns of detection and diagnosis
• An increasing call for accountability both
  fiscal and professional in the delivery of
  specialized support for such children and their
  families.
• Placing new challenges on educational
  planners, school administrators, teachers, and
  teacher educators.
• Highlighting the significance of refining our
  instructional practices, of developing new
  strategies, and establishing an empirical
  evidence base regarding the efficacy such
  procedures.
• This is the core business of our research node.

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Research focus

• Applied and more theoretical issues regarding
• the development and trialling of instructional
  strategies for children with developmental
  disability
• the development and trialling of procedures to
  support the application of effective inclusive
  educational procedures for these in schools and
  early childhood education facilities, and
• the support of parents of children with
  developmental disabilities and a better
  understanding of factors leading to parental
  stress / improved family functioning
• the support of educators working with students
  with high support needs in regular and specialist
  settings.

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Current Program of Research

• Child focussed interventions (Anderson,
  Furlonger, Gordon, Moore, Sharma)
• Communication
• Social skills (in particular initiations)
• Play (especially symbolic)
• Behavioural flexibility / choice training
• Sleep
• Parent support
• Parenting program (Sharma)
• Sleep training (Gordon)
• School / early childhood centre (Anderson,
  Deppeler)
• Family functioning risk and resilience factors
  (McLean)

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Current Program of Research

• Intervention Strategies
• Cooperative Learning (4)
• Peer mediated instruction (2)
• Picture Exchange Communication System (5)
• Pivotal Response Training (5)
• Social Stories (3)
• Video modelling / Video feed forward (4)
• Sleep routines / planned ignoring / DRO (6)

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Members

• Anderson, Angelika
• Chong, Renee
• Deppeler, Joanne
• Furlonger, Brett
• Gordon, Jocelynne
• Jurgens, Anneke
• McLean, Louise
• Moore, Dennis
• Sharma, Umesh
• Yoon, Annie