Article: The Search for an Early Intervention Outcome Measurement Tool in Autism. By Fletcher-Watson and McConachie. In Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 32 (1) 2017.

Are you familiar with the ADOS? Anyone with an ASD kid who has tried to wrestle services from a school district (e.g., IEP) knows about the ADOS. The ADOS is currently the self-report gold standard for help with diagnosis of ASD, but it does not work well as an outcomes measure. There are lots of reasons for this, and I do not want to get into it here (I also have a very loose understanding of the whole thing), but the prospect of having a simple to use, valid and reliable measure of change based on intervention for ASD kids is a tantalizing one. In short, it would be great to know if all the work we do in and out of therapy and programming is actually having any affect.

The sad news is that Social Orientating Continuum and Response Scale (SOC-RS; the scale they are testing to see if it works "better" than the ADOS for measuring intervention outcomes) is something of a flop. And it is hard to administer. The good news is that we are seeing a report of "unimpressive findings" in a peer reviewed journal. This is a rare occurrence, and increases the validity of this publication (which is good, because I have been reporting on studies from this thing for a while now).

The ADOS is not that great either, by the way, for measuring change based on intervention in ASD kids.