The role of families in both the assessment and intervention process has received increased attention in recent years. Contrary to earlier beliefs that autism was caused by parental rejection, lack of love, or inadequate parenting skills (Janzen, 1999), today it is understood that the parents or primary caretaker(s) of children affected by ASD are the focal points to promote and enhance the development of social communication (Warren et al., 2002). It is therefore essential that they not only be directly involved in the evaluation process as providers of information, but also considered the most important recipients of the evaluation results and interpretation (Marcus & Schopler, 1987).
With the goal being to acquire the knowledge necessary to construct an intervention plan, the assessment should, specifically:
- determine the child’s communication means (e.g., use of gestures, sounds, or words)
- assess the range and frequency of communicative functions or purposes for communicating, such as behavior regulation or joint attention (Wetherby et al., 2000)
- observe the contexts and conditions which appear to promote the best attention or comprehension by the child, including the caretaker’s ability to evaluate communicative effectiveness, and when necessary, fix or repair failing communicative attempts to improve their child’s understanding (Prizant & Schuler, 1987), and
- assess the child’s typical play behaviors (Wolfberg & Schuler, 1999). These components are detailed further below.
An assessment of communication means should include: children’s ability to use social/affective signaling, their ability to use gaze shifts between the person and object, their expression of positive affect with directed eye gaze, and episodes of negative affect; conventional communicative forms such as conventional gestures (e.g. giving, showing, pointing, reaching), use of distal gestures (e.g. pointing at a distance), coordination of gestures and vocalizations; vocalizations, with and without gestures, and word use (Wetherby et al., 2000), sign, or other augmentative communication (Quill, 1995), and nonstandard communication means which may include behaviors such as tantrums and running, and/or echolalia (Quill, 1995).
