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Thursday, May 15, 2008
Champagne Terrace/Bordeaux (Novotel London West)
10:30 AM
Background: The M-COSMIC was devised to extend the original COSMIC (Pasco et al, submitted) observational measure of the intentional communication of children with autism in an unstructured classroom setting. The original COSMIC was designed for use with children with low cognitive ability and no or limited speech. The M-COSMIC sought to extend this measure by including further items relating to early social communication which could be used to assess children with a wider range of cognitive and language abilities in naturalistic classroom settings.
Objectives: To investigate the psychometric properties of the M-COSMIC, including criterion-related validity and inter-rater reliability.
Methods: Participants consisted of 25 children with autism who were seen as part of the Preschool Autism Communication Trial (PACT: http://www.medicine.manchester.ac.uk/pact/). Children received the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule – Generic (ADOS-G, Lord et al., 2000), standardised language assessments, and the M-COSMIC at the same time and thus constituted a concurrent criterion-related validity sample. The children, aged 3 years 6 months to 6 years were videoed during teaching and free play activities at nursery/school, and frequency counts of intentional communication behaviours as defined by the M-COSMIC were taken from the videos. To examine the validity of this measure, scores from the M-COSMIC will be correlated with relevant scores from the ADOS-G and standardised language and communication measures (PLS, VABS).
Results: Data from approximately 25 children with autism will be presented. Pearson correlations and regression analyses will be used to analyse the concurrent validity. Inter-rater reliability results will be measured using intra-class correlations.
Conclusions: It is anticipated that the results will inform us of the potential use of this ecological measure as an outcome measure for communication-focused intervention trails. It is also expected that the measure will have research and clinical value in assessing social communication behaviours in a naturalistic setting.
Objectives: To investigate the psychometric properties of the M-COSMIC, including criterion-related validity and inter-rater reliability.
Methods: Participants consisted of 25 children with autism who were seen as part of the Preschool Autism Communication Trial (PACT: http://www.medicine.manchester.ac.uk/pact/). Children received the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule – Generic (ADOS-G, Lord et al., 2000), standardised language assessments, and the M-COSMIC at the same time and thus constituted a concurrent criterion-related validity sample. The children, aged 3 years 6 months to 6 years were videoed during teaching and free play activities at nursery/school, and frequency counts of intentional communication behaviours as defined by the M-COSMIC were taken from the videos. To examine the validity of this measure, scores from the M-COSMIC will be correlated with relevant scores from the ADOS-G and standardised language and communication measures (PLS, VABS).
Results: Data from approximately 25 children with autism will be presented. Pearson correlations and regression analyses will be used to analyse the concurrent validity. Inter-rater reliability results will be measured using intra-class correlations.
Conclusions: It is anticipated that the results will inform us of the potential use of this ecological measure as an outcome measure for communication-focused intervention trails. It is also expected that the measure will have research and clinical value in assessing social communication behaviours in a naturalistic setting.