Editorial

Citation

Chaplin, E. and McCarthy, J. (2020), "Editorial", Advances in Autism, Vol. 6 No. 3, pp. 177-178. https://doi.org/10.1108/AIA-07-2020-056

Welcome to the third edition of 2020. This edition focusses on interventions aimed at autistic children, explores the perspectives of mainstream pre-school teachers working with autistic children and the final paper provides the perspectives of parents from two different countries. The papers come from authors across a number of countries and this sharing of our knowledge at international level must continue so as to benefit all autistic young people wherever they live in the world.

The first paper from Mills and colleagues seeks to evaluate the efficacy of a sensory activity schedule (SAS) used in a school setting on task mastery and occupational performance in the classroom. Although sensory processing difficulties can negatively affect children with autism at school, there is still limited evidence to guide practice in this area. The study is a randomised control trial of children who received the SAS intervention compared to those who received only usual teaching. The intervention group demonstrated statistically significant improvements in school performance compared with the control group.

The second paper from Fabio and colleagues investigates whether cognitive flexibility deficits could be related to facial emotion recognition deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Twenty children with ASD were matched with 20 neurotypical controls and were examined for both facial emotion recognition tasks and cognitive flexibility tasks using the dimensional change card-sorting task. The results indicate that cognitive flexibility deficits are related to facial emotion recognition deficits in children with ASD.

The third paper from Nah examines the perspectives of mainstream pre-school teachers in Singapore, on challenging behaviours and the teaching challenges they bring in mainstream pre-school inclusive settings. Difficulty in change/transition and social/peer interaction were the most concerning behaviours reported by teachers, with “lesson time” and “circle time” being the two most common settings where concerns about behaviour were reported.

The fourth paper from Altakhaineh and colleagues examined the effectiveness of using colours and the impact of learner’s IQ in teaching new vocabulary in Arabic (L1) and English (L2) to children with ASD. The study reported IQ played a crucial role in learning L1 and L2 vocabulary; however, colours had no significant impact on performance.

The fifth paper from Colombo and colleagues reflects on the application of a Soundbeam Imitation Intervention (SII). The intervention is based on the imitation of meaningless body gestures and is supported by a musical feedback. It works on the hypothesis that a systematic activation of this system through the simultaneous observation–execution of meaningless body gestures may affect functional changes of mirror-related functions. The findings offer preliminary evidence that imitation and social attention skills acquired through SII can be generalised to a video-modelling imitation setting.

The final paper from Baker and colleagues is a comparative qualitative study with parents in the USA and China, aimed to increase understanding of the experiences of adults with autism in both countries. Eighteen families participated in the study – 7 in the USA, 11 in China. Three overarching themes emerged with one finding being that Chinese parents expressed significantly more worries related to their own aging and mortality as compared to US parents.

Since writing the last editorial, the world has been gripped by the Coronavirus pandemic. The following link may be useful http://radiant.nhs.uk/coronavirus-covid-19.html, as it offers information on COVID-19 and links to other websites aimed at the autistic community and also links to resources for those with intellectual disabilities and other developmental disorders, which includes more accessible information. The information is offered by RADiANT and more information on this organisation can be found here http://radiant.nhs.uk/.

We hope you enjoy this edition of the journal and wish to thank you for your continuing support for Advances in Autism. We invite contributions from our readers to the journal and welcome a variety of papers on areas including innovative and evidence-based practice, research, case studies, service and policy-related issues and literature reviews. We welcome submissions from the range of health and social care professionals, but additionally those who use services and people who care for them. If you would like to know more about how to submit your work for publication, please contact us at (mail to: chapline@lsbu.ac.uk).