My last post was nearly 5 months ago. Yikes. I promise, the dog lays around a lot, but not me. Here I am plugging away on my dissertation project and it is a top priority. The finish line, while not yet in sight, gets closer every day. There remains quite a bit of work to do but I’m optimistic that it will all work out (and to be candid, I have not always been confident about that). There are ups and downs, I remind myself, just as I remind the undergraduate students with whom I have had the opportunity to work.
Summer quickly passed. I spent time working a part-time clinical position and enjoyed finding balance between providing clinical services to families and their children and my dissertation project. Much of the reading related to my dissertation project relates to social communication, and specifically, communicative repair. It was rewarding to think about how the work I am doing might help us (our field, researchers and clinicians together) more completely understand and address a specific social communication skill (i.e., communicative repair) in children with ASD. Clinical work reminds me how difficult it may be for some learners to acquire and maintain social communication skills as well as demonstrate robust generalization across social partners and contexts.
Along these lines, two recently published articles have caught my attention, the first, an ASHA Leader article “Beyond Skills: The Worth of Social Competence” (Winner & Crooke, 2016) describes the importance of considering the language we choose to talk about social-oriented goals and argues that using terms like social competence (compared to social skills) highlights perhaps the greater complexity involved in developing better social communication. Additionally, in the article, Dr. Janet Dodd presents a thoughtful description of the link between targeting social competence and the Common Core standards (see the stand alone text box near the end of the article). I remain curious about how we best measure social competence? I doubt there will be a definitive answer. One of my committee members, Dr. Sheri Stronach, encouraged me to think deeply about how we measure social communication intervention outcomes so that’s what I continue to do 🙂
The second (recent article that caught my attention) describes a curriculum designed to increase conversation skills of school age children with ASD and reports results from a pilot program that included four participants (see Müller, Cannon, Kornblum, Clark and Powers. 2016). I appreciate the detailed description of the curriculum (read the article!). It mirrors other frameworks/curricula (e.g., Social Communication Intervention Project; Adams et al., 2012; Teaching Interaction Procedure; Leaf et al., 2009 and Think Social; Madrigal & Winner, 2008) and was implemented in a school setting. I think it is important to note that the authors measured changes in discrete, observable conversation skills (pre and post intervention) as well as staff reports of participants’ skills generalization and growth over the course of the school year. I think both school-based and private practice SLPs who work with children with social communication challenges will find the article valuable (note the limitations, including lack of experimental control via a control group or a robust single case design). Nevertheless, I was encouraged to see the use of a mixed method design and look forward to more research (from this group and others) in this complex and extremely important area of our field.
For now, back to the dissertation work.
hannahmjulien 
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