Pearson Assessments

Archive for the ‘Services, Treatments, and Interventions’ Category

Managing Feeding and Toileting Challenges in Children with Autism

Challenges with toilet training (e.g., frequent accidents, withholding urine or feces) and eating (e.g., food selectivity, getting sufficient nutritional intake) may have a significant impact on the child’s functioning in the home, school, community, and social events. These issues often impact...

Autism Without Fear: An Autism School Seeks Behavioral Health…Through Humanism

Disclaimer: This past year I consulted for the League School of Greater Boston, the school that is the subject of this piece. I worked with their students on a self-advocacy curriculum, and I’ve also presented for the school on separate occasions. Seeing what they are attempting up close demanded...

Helping Families with Disabilities Transition from Child to Adult Systems of Care

Having a child diagnosed with a lifelong disability is like planning a trip to one country, but unexpectedly arriving in a different country (read Emily Perl Kingsley’s essay Welcome to Holland). Just imagine, you have nothing packed that would make the trip easier or more comfortable, and you do...

Parent Involvement as a Metric of Quality Care

A family-centered approach has been considered best practice for many years in early intervention and pediatric rehabilitation (Bailey, Buysse, Edmondson, 1992; Baird & Peterson, 1997). For students with complex medical, physical, developmental, and behavioral challenges, a family-centered...

Supporting Families in ABA Programs with Compassion and Sensitivity

Imagine the feeling of expecting a child. You dream for your child, wonder what they will be like, wonder if they will be funny or smart, outgoing, or quiet. You wonder about a lot of things, but you don’t wonder whether they will ever learn to talk. You don’t wonder if they will ever have a...

The Role of Compassion in Professional ABA Services Relationships

“Phenomenology or phenomenological psychology, a sub-discipline of psychology, is the scientific study of subjective experiences. It is an approach to psychological subject matter that attempts to explain experiences from the point of view of the subject via the analysis of their written or...

Services for the UnderServed’s Positive Psychology Approach to Serving People in Crisis and Their Families

Since 2016, Service for the UnderServed’s START/CSIDD (Crisis Services for Individuals with Intellectual and/or Developmental Disabilities) Program offers crisis prevention and response services to people who have both developmental disabilities and complex behavioral needs and their families and...

The Promise of Quality ABA: What Value-Based Care Means for Families

As the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) continues to rise, parents of children with autism face significant challenges in obtaining high-quality and appropriate care and services. Delays in diagnosis, waitlists for treatment, shortage of available providers, high staff turnover, and a...

Reaching Ukraine: Occupational Therapy-Centered Training to Support Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Kyiv

In the Eastern European country of Ukraine where there are more than 44 million residents (Archer, Harper, & Cameron, 2020), there are just 3 ergotherapists (Ukrainian translation for occupational therapists) in practice (Imas & Lazarieva, 2017). Though Ukrainian health officials recognize...

The Future of Autism and ABA: Predicting Outcomes

For children with autism, there are several competing forces at play that could potentially impact their futures. Legislation mandating coverage1 of applied behavior analysis (ABA) is making this valuable treatment accessible to all. But the rapid explosion in demand for ABA and infusion of private...