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JASPER research results


Connie Kasari, PhD

Center for Autism Research and Treatment, UCLA

That first study that we did on joint attention and symbolic play spawned a lot of different randomized control trials. So lots of different interests. The first study told us that probably joint engagement was an active ingredient or probably the mechanism for why both of the experimental interventions worked better than the control group. Right, so in the first study, the experimental groups gained about 15 to 17 months language in 12 months, compared to the controlled group that gained about 7 1/2 months. And these were all kids getting 30 hours of ABA. So what that told us was that just that little focus on joint attention and joint engagement and play mattered. So the content mattered, but it was against this backdrop of a lot of hours of intervention. So dose probably still is important. So, in our current study that we are doing, we are comparing well-implemented discrete trial training. So Tris Smith is our partner in this research, compared to JASPER. And we are giving it every day for an hour to 3 and 4 year-old children in the schools, and we are doing it for 6 months. So we’ve extended the length of that original study, both daily length and the length of the treatment. And the goal here is to really try to understand what happens when you have well-implemented DTT and well-implemented JASPER in terms of outcomes that are cognitive and language based outcomes. So I think that is pitting these two head to head, but our hypotheses are that we might get different things from these different treatments. And that'll be important, because it will tell us how we might approach both content and how we approach the intervention in terms of outcomes. So that is one study. We also have all of our studies with under-served, under-represented children. And under-served/represented are kids that are poor, under-resourced...so studies in the home, studies in schools where children are very under-resourced, because they are low-income urban schools. Or because their children are fully included, high functioning, but have no help, no support in the schools. We’re also doing studies with very young infants. So, again, a group of children that are under-served.

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