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Background
Information and Basic Principles of Practice
Alphabet Therapy was specifically designed for children with Angelman syndrome, but it may apply to people
with other similar conditions.
People with Angelman
syndrome (AS) are severely intellectually delayed and there are no published reports of a person with genetically confirmed
AS having the ability to read. The education of Angelman children has therefore focused on social integration and the
acquisition of life-skills. One in-depth study done in 2001 on 20 AS subjects found that not one of them exceeded Piaget’s
developmental age of 0-2 years and their median age of language development was 9 months. Researchers have set the average
developmental level of AS patients at 15 months and found that over 53% of adults with AS had an IQ of less than 40, with
the remainder scoring between 40-69. In all published studies, those AS patients who are “deletion positive”
appear to have the worst prognosis in terms of developmental and intellectual achievement. (For more information, see
www.angelman.org)
So, how would you go about teaching academic
skills to children who have a disability as severe as AS???? We think we have a way to do it!!!
Using a combination of techniques from Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) our team created
Alphabet Therapy!!! ABA is commonly recognized as the best way to teach children with autism. While RPM has not
yet been studied academically, it is an exciting way to use ABA techniques to work with severely autistic children.
Although many researchers have not found a discrepancy between receptive
and expressive language levels in AS, some studies and many parents report that people with Angelman syndrome have higher
receptive than expressive capabilities. We can use those skills!!!
The
Alphabet Therapy method breaks the learning process into very small tasks which require concrete responses from the Angelman
child. Perhaps this simple way of reducing the expressive communication required from the child allows his potential
for receptive learning to be revealed.
Children with AS have a more severe prognosis than most children diagnosed as autistic. In addition,
about half of children with AS are dually diagnosed with autism. All suffer from impaired fine motor skills, severe
retardation and hyperactivity. Alphabet Therapy combines RPM with traditional ABA so that these children can be taught
to recognize and demonstrate knowledge of the alphabet with a minimal motor requirement and a very structured system of rewards
and delayed gratification.
What makes Alphabet
Therapy So Exciting??
Using this new methodology, we have taught
the alphabet (as well as colors, numbers and quantities) to an 8 year old boy with deletion-positive Angelman syndrome!!!
He has an 80 - 90% accuracy rate measured in discrete trials. He is now learning sight reading, addition and subtraction and
is beginning to learn multiplication and spelling, using the same methodology!!!
Currently, we are conducting a study to see if other children with AS can learn via the Alphabet Therapy Method.
The results of that study will not be final until summer, 2008. The study is currently full and is not accepting additional
participants (please see www….)
For
more information about the ABC Therapy Study at Vanderbilt University, please see www.kc.vanderbilt.edu/kennedy/research/angelman.html For more information about ABA, please see www.abainternational.org
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