Daniel Conine, Ph.D., published, “Assessment and treatment of response to name for children with autism spectrum disorder: Toward an efficient intervention model” for the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. He answers questions about his work.
How does this publication help with your research goals and/or interests?
“My research focuses on interventions to improve learning and communication skills among young children with autism. I’m especially concerned with making interventions as effective and efficient as possible. This publication is the latest in a line of research on teaching children with autism to recognize and respond to their own names. Responding to one’s name is a milestone in development that many children with autism “miss” during infancy and many continue to not respond when people call their names throughout childhood and into the school-age years. As you can imagine, this is a substantial safety risk for young children! Learning to respond to one’s name has also been implicated as important for developing other language and social skills throughout childhood, so it’s a really important skill to establish as early as possible for young children with autism.”
Summarize your topic for us
“In this study, we wanted to create the most effective and most efficient treatment we could. We were very pleased with the results. In this study, it took approximately one-third as much time for children to successfully finish the intervention compared with other interventions for this skill that have been published over the last three years!”
What’s Next?
“Currently my team and I are working on two future projects in this area. First, we are trying to make this intervention even more efficient by trying out a new screening tool that we proposed in this paper to predict which types of intervention work best for which individual children. We are currently rolling that out across multiple research sites to see if we can keep doing an even better job at getting faster results for our children with autism. The second area we are pursuing is teaching parents how to conduct this intervention at home with their children. This is really important because there are long waitlists for intervention services all over the country right now, and COVID-19 has only made those lists longer! My team and I want to increase access to treatment for as many children and families as we can, as early as possible. We are hoping to leverage telehealth technology and parent training to make progress toward that goal!”
Are there other people to be credited?
Vollmer, T. R., Barlow, M. A., Grauerholz-Fisher, E. G., Dela Rosa, C. M., & Petronelli, A. K.