Autism Assessment - Part 1

I found that the first part of this segment was very informative in discussing the different between the medical diagnosing and the role of the educational assessments.  Medical professionals should be the only people that are diagnosing children with autism.  Educational specialists, even though they see many different children, have no training or license to diagnose a child.  Many parents do in fact ask the opinions of the educational professionals, but they should just be referred back to the medical professional.  It eliminates the misinterpretations of whether or not a child might have autism or be developing typically.

It is very important when developing an education plan for children with autism to have all professionals involved in the assessment process to determine what the best course of treatment would be for the child.  As the speakers pointed out, all children with autism are unique in their own ways and need to be assessed separately.  I also strongly agree with them on the involvement of the parents during the assessment process because the parents are the people that know the child the best when referring to their development, personalities, strengths and weaknesses.  It was really interesting how all the professionals develop activities together, so each area is assessed and how they include natural observations instead of just evaluating the child based on assessments.  Most children perform better in their own environment compare to an unfamiliar environment with unfamiliar people.

It was interesting on learning about the Gold Standard Assessment and the guideline that are used by educational professionals.  I agree with all of the guidelines that they discussed: inter-disciplinary involvement, structural and naturalistic observations, validity and reliability, knowledge in autism, the child’s unique needs, inclusion of parents and looking at all of the areas that might be of concern when relating to autism.

Besides the stressing by the speakers that educational professionals do not diagnose only conduct assessments, I thought it was also very important that these professionals that conduct the assessments have knowledge about Autism.  Autism is such a disorder that can develop in many different areas and ways that a person assessing the child should have knowledge about these differences.  As more information is discovered about the disorder, the assessments and criteria change and professionals should be aware of the changes.  This part of the segment was very informative and interesting.