Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have challenges with communication, social interactions, and behavior, which can limit their functioning in school settings. They need to have functional communication skills to access the curriculum and have their needs met across all social environments. Special education teachers often experience…

For children with complex communication needs (CCN), augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices offer a means to communicate and participate in daily activities. Effective implementation and intervention practices are needed for supporting teaching teams working with children with CCN to improve child use of AAC. The purpose of this…

This study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of using the high-tech speech-generating device with Proloquo2Go app to reduce echolalic utterances in a student with autism during conversational speech. After observing that the iPad device with several apps was used by the students and that it served as a communication device, language…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulty generalizing newly acquired communication skills to different contexts. In this study, a multiple baseline across settings (clinic, school, and home) design was used to determine whether an 8-year-old boy with ASD could learn to approach communication partners to request…

This single participant multiple baseline research design measured the effects of repeatedly reading narrative books to children who used voice output augmentative communication devices to communicate. The study sought to determine if there was a difference observed in the number of turns taken when reading stories repeatedly. Three girls ranging…

This study grew from a need identified by professionals working in the same community to explore interagency support for augmentative and alternative communication device implementation with students, families, and professionals involving the local school system and university. A case study was used to document intervention with a second-grade…

A qualitative interview methodology was used to investigate the perspectives of 10 Hungarian parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) concerning their decision-making processes undertaken to make communication intervention decisions for their children. Six themes were identified from the data: (a) sources of information, (b)…

The Office of Special Education and Student Services asked the Office of Shared Accountability to evaluate the "Facilitated Communication Pilot." In facilitated communication (FC), people with communication impairments express themselves by typing with the aid of a communication partner, called a facilitator, who provides physical (and…

Teachers, speech and language therapists, teaching assistants and nursery nurses are required to work together in a range of contexts in Foundation Stage (FS) school settings in the UK. In some cases these groups of practitioners are mutually involved in the implementation of a strategy or intervention and in the use of a particular tool or…

Despite expansive improvements in both treatments and research, the majority of persons with autism use non-empirically supported interventions. One way to decrease the research-to-practice gap involves increasing the direct applicability of research findings to clinical settings. Effectiveness research achieves this goal by identifying treatments…

This report presents the activities, accomplishments, and outcomes of a study of the long-term outcomes of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) interventions with individuals with severe communication disabilities. The study evaluated long-term outcomes for 7 young men (ages 19-23 years) who had used AAC systems for at least 15 years.…