A successful research visit to Nashville

 Chris and Kari-Anne on sightseeing Saturday afternoon 
(The Nash Trash Bus tour)

During the conference on communication in children with Down syndrome that we arranged in Oslo this autumn I was happy to learn that Chris Lemons (http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/bio/christopher-lemons) and I shared a great deal of communality in our research interests. We discussed additional ways for us to collaborate and as a result I have had the chance to spend some days in Nashville visiting Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. Vanderbilt University is ranked as the best special education doctoral training program in the US and has a team of excellent senior researchers within special education including Ann Kaiser, Lynn Fuchs and Douglas Fuchs, all of whom I was honored to meet. I was asked to give a talk about my research, and I also got the chance to meet with highly skilled master and PhD students.



During my stay, plans for several years of future work were made. We had nice discussions and planned for collaborative grant application(s) and future research visits. Our first small collaborative pilot study related to vocabulary intervention in children with Down syndrome is planned to start in the spring 2018 and will challenge me to learn more about single case experiments which I never have conducted before. I am eager to learn more about single case since it will be a useful tool to evaluate designs before scaling up a large scale RCT study.

Chris has been the very best host and I think my stay also gave me a fabulous opportunity to get some more known with his nice colleagues, how academia work in the US, the Nashville’s culture and his own family and home. I am so grateful for an amazing stay!

The new plans made up in Nashville means that it may also be possible to participate in an intervention study for six year olds with Down syndrome next year.  We will recruit a smaller group of participants compared to our ongoing project; some parents have already contacted us regarding participation next year so they will be placed on a waiting list and will be contacted when the recruitment process of the study starts. Further information about this study will be made available next spring. Please follow our updates about new recruitment on our blog.