Social Development:

Children with ASDs, to one degree or another, fail to initiate contact with other people, or to respond to the social cues and approaches of others. The initial goals of any interventions are to improve social interaction because it is inseparable from communication skills.

Behavioural interventions focus on improving the deficits seen in eye contact, imitation skills, or the use of language. In the developmental models, children with ASDs are assessed for their ability to perform motor tasks, to learn, and to communicate both verbally and non-verbally. Areas of deficit are determined, and remedial teaching focuses on tasks or skills that the child is assumed to be ready to learn next. The model is based on the assumption that all children, no matter what their deficits, will follow a typical child’s developmental path.

Conclusions:

• The committee found that there is better evidence for the effectiveness of behavioural programs than there is for programs that use developmental interventions for teaching social interaction.
• There is very little research that has compared the two approaches to each other to demonstrate if one is superior to the other.

Recommendations:

• Studies of developmental interventions are needed to determine their effectiveness in the treatment of young children with ASDs.
• Studies comparing various treatments are needed.
• Researchers need to use clinically useful outcome measures (i.e., those that have an effect in the "real world").
• Research needs to be conducted to look at the interventions themselves, and not at how they are delivered, to determine if they work.
• Research is needed that looks at different interventions and how they interact with the strengths and weakness of individual children to determine how much or how little progress will be made.
• Research is needed to find ways of individualizing treatment and education for children with ASDs because no one method works for all children.