Funding from Uio: Life Science has resulted in plans for future research related to Down syndrome!

Silje and Kari-Anne received funding from UiO: Life Science to conduct a two-week Research stay at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. The purpose of the visit was to follow up on an ongoing Collaboration Project With Associate Professor Christopher Lemons and his research team, as well as making further plans for research involving children With intellectual disability.

Vanderbilt University Campus

Earlier this year, Christopher Lemons received an internal grant from Vanderbilt University to translate and pilot an American short version of the Down Syndrome LanguagePlus Intervention (DSL+). Since then we have been working together on the adaption of the American version. During Our stay, we have discussed linguistic challanges related to the translation of tasks, study design, measures and different other methodological aspects in order to esure high quality research. We met with SLP students working on the projectt and we participated in the first round of audio recordings for the app.


Furthermore, we started the preparations of a new review study related to interventions in children with intellectual disabilities. This review will be a collaboration Project between senior and junior researchers at Peabody and UiO. In addition, we have started the work on a research proposal related to a new intervention project that will be sent to the research counsil of Norway within April 10th.


Christopher Lemons organized a fantastic Down syndrome symposium. Altogether, there were 9 talks from researchers within the field, focusing on communication, speech, language, phonological awareness, reading, and teaching of children with Down syndrome. We are Grateful for all the researchers, both speakers and active discussion partners, for providing Insight into recent and ongoing studies as well as contributing with valuable input in methodological discussions.


We would also extend a great thanks to Lynn Fuchs, Douglas Fuchs and Christopher Lemons for inviting us to their expert panel discussion on career and research applications for the departments PhD students. Especially the discussion on "small research": how to conduct research without large external funding Sources appealed to us.


In addition to the above-mentioned activities we have had the pleasure to meet with several researchers for dicussions of important issues related to special needs education both in formal and informal events.


Finally, we would like to thank Christopher Lemons, his Family and his research team for preparing such a great stay in Nashville and for taking great care of us day and night. We look forward to future collaboration and seeing you again soon!

Chris, Kari-Anne & Silje at Cheekwood

Kari-Anne & Silje

DSL+-prosjektet skal samle data i Oslo-området for barn med utviklingshemming

 

DSL+ er en digital språkintervensjon som har til hovedmålsetting å fremme vokabularutvikling med fokus på både breddevokabular (antall ord barnet kan) og dybdevokabular (hvor godt barnet kan ord). DSL+-appen er prøvd ut med en gruppe barn med Down syndrom med positive erfaringer, og vi ønsker nå å prøve den ut med 1. klassinger med utviklingshemming.

 

Masterstudenter ved institutt for spesialpedagogikk har bitt invitert til å søke om deltakelse i prosjektet. Mange studenter søkte, og vi har i dag avgjort hvilke studenter som skal få tilbud om å skrive sin masteroppgave i tilknytning til prosjektet 2018/2019. Vi gratulerer Anja Gram Andersen, Live Rødsand Kvernmo, Malin Rakke og Elise Mari Solberg med tilbudet!

ØV Anja, ØH Live NV Elise Mari NH Malin

Dersom du har et barn med utviklingshemming som går i 1. klasse skoleåret 2018/2019, dere bor et sted mellom Buskerud, Vestfold, Oslo og Akershus og dere ønsker å delta i studien bes dere ta kontakt med prosjektleder Kari-Anne B. Næss på mailadresse k.a.b.nass@uv.uio.no

World Down Syndrome Congress, 2018

This year the World Down syndrome Congress is organized in Glasgow by Down's syndrome Scotland. More than 1,200 people from around the world are participating. The DSL+-project is represented at the congress with Liz Smith, Liv Inger Engevik, Silje Hokstad, and Kari-Anne B. Næss.



The DSL+ delegates

We aimed to learn about new research in the field of Down syndrome, meet with international colleagues and parents, and arrange the Symposium on Research in Language and Communication among Children with Down Syndrome. The objective of the symposium was to increase knowledge about the language and communication interventions for children with Down syndrome in order to improve the future research quality and intervention approaches in the field of practice. In order to explore the current state of the field and guide future research and practice this symposium first highlighted the findings from a systematic review, summarizing the effect of existing interventions. Second, the implementation quality in the previous studies was reviewed. Thereafter, we presented two sub studies from the DSL+-project. One of the sub studies reported the framework of the intervention and some preliminary findings of the effect and the other was related to interactive dialogical reading of the picture books included in the program. Our symposium was more than filled to capacity; In addition to filling all seats people was standing or sitting on the floor in the back of the congress room. I am thankful to the audience for their participation and all the interesting questions and comments after our presentations. Also, I would like to thank our international colleagues for their interesting contributions in the discussions – and great thanks to the fantastic DSL+-team.  



Kelly Burgoyne

During the congress there have been several interesting presentations for us by e.g. Kelly Burgoyne who talked about shared book reading, Chris Lemons that focused on research on enhancing literacy outcomes, and Sue Buckley who talked about Developing evidence based early intervention and education. Yesterday morning Deborah Fidler gave a very well structured and interesting talk on which skills are important to monitor closely and to intervene in young children with Down syndrome especially with the focus on school functioning. Fidler is a great researcher within the field and has a long time experiences doing a lot of great empirical work. This time I also found Fidler’s talk interesting but I was a bit protonated by her crossing out both cognitive skills and language/communication as NOT RELATED TO SCHOOL FUNCTIONING. Her focus in the talk was of course the executive functioning which she obvious wanted to highlight as important. However, there is challenging to demonstrate that an effect is absolutely absent. Her interpretation of a non-significant result is in my opinion taken way too long (I think it is this paper she was referring to: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4012569/pdf/167.pdf ). Eventual lack of unique contribution does not mean that cognition and language and communication it is not contributing. This result depends among others on overlap between measures, significance level, number of particippants and power in the analysis. To make such a strong claim based on a sample size around 20 and for three conditions can actually be totally misleading. I really hope that the parents and practitioners among the audience not think that there is no need for language training for the child to improve their school functioning. A GREAT DEAL OF EVIDENCE HAS SHOWN THAT LANGUAGE IS IMPORTANT FOR A RANGE OF LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENTAL AREAS RELEVANT TO ACADEMIC AS WELL AS SOCIAL SKILLS. I had hope I had misunderstood something in her talk but a short chat in the break with some of my international colleagues confirmed that my understanding was not a result me not being native English speaker or not following her justifications, Unfortunately there were not possible to ask questions in this session so I still have a few unanswered questions for Fidler regarding her interpretation of the results. The congress also had it’s own poster area, Several poster presentations were given and especially I was interested in the interventions by Rebecca Baxter on grammar and Lauren LeJeune on phonological awareness. Liz Smith from our project group also gave a poster presentation on a novel measure to track potential early signs of dementia.



Liz Smith in her poster session

We have had some lovely days in Glasgow both substantial and socially. Research plans have been made, ideas for funding applications have been discussed, and we have also met with Norwegian parents and resource persons. After all these years in the same research community many of these people have been good friends that we really appreciate to stay in touch with. We are now about to arrive in Norway again after some intensive days but Liz will stay for two more days in Glasgow. I am grateful for this year’s congress and for being part of this research community! Looking forward to the next world congress in Dubai in 2022.

 

#DetVirker

Fredag 1. juni arrangerer Institutt for Spesialpedagogikk dagskonferanse om spesialpedagogiske tiltak som virker. Konferansen har blitt mottatt med stor interesse og ble fulltegnet på kort tid. Som følge av den store interessen holdes konferansen i storsalen på Chateu Neuf, som rommer hele 1000 deltakere!  Konferansen streames og kan dermed følges live her: 

Program

Dørene åpner klokken 08:00.

1. Innledning

Barneombud Anne Lindboe

2. Åpning av konferansen

Kunnskaps- og integreringsminister Jan Tore Sanner

2. Presentasjon av tiltak basert på hva forskningen sier virker

• Anne Arnesen (UiO): Spesialpedagogisk kartlegging - basert på hva forskningen sier virker
• Terje Ogden (NUBU): Barn og ungdom med atferdsvansker - tiltak basert på hva forskningen sier virker
• Kari-Anne Bottegaard Næss (UiO): Barn og ungdom med utviklingshemming - tiltak basert på hva forskningen sier virker
• Arne Lervåg (UiO): Barn og ungdom med språkvansker - tiltak basert på hva forskningen sier virker
• Monica Melby-Lervåg (UiO) og Anita Lopez-Pedersen (UiO): Barn og ungdom med matematikkvansker - tiltak basert på hva forskningen sier virker
• Lunsj
• Ona Bø Wie (UiO): Barn- og ungdom med hørselsnedsettelse - tiltak basert på hva forskningen sier virker
• Anett Kaale (UiO): Barn og ungdom medautismespekterforstyrrelser - tiltak basert på hva forskningen sier virker
• Oddny Judith Solheim (UiS): Barn og ungdom med lese- og skrivevansker - tiltak basert på hva forskningen sier virker
• Mari Vaage Wang (Ekspertgruppen/Folkehelseinstituttet) - Rapporten «Inkluderende fellesskap for barn og unge»

3. Paneldebatt med

• Camilla Herlofsen (UiA)
• Torill Moen (NTNU)
• Sten Ludvigsen (UiO) 
• Peder Haug (Høgkskolen i Volda)
• Monica Melby-Lervåg (UiO)
• Mari Vaage Wang (Ekspertgruppen/Folkehelseinstituttet) 
• Anne Lindboe barneombud

Vi ser frem til en lærerik dag med mange spennende innlegg ved Chateu Neuf!

Silje Hokstad har blitt stipendiat

Gratulerer så mye med stipendiatstillingen, Silje!
Silje Hokstad ble "headhuntet" som forskningsassistent I DSL+ - prosjektet i 2014. Hun startet først i en bitteliten prosentstilling som ble økt etter hvert. Med tiden fikk hun 100% stilling. Etter at hun leverte sin masteroppgave høsten 2017 gikk hun over i en forskerstilling i prosjektet og har gjort en aldeles strålende jobb!

Silje er utdannet spesialpedagog ved institutt for spesialpedagogikk, hun har 60 studiepoeng alternative og supplerende kommunikasjon fra HSN og har tidligere jobbet som spesialpedagog i Osloskolen. De siste årene har hun altså vært tilknyttet DSL+-prosjektet. Hun kjenner prosjektet ut og inn og har allerede vært med på å holde kurs for lærere, innlegg på internasjonale konferanser, samt skrive både artikler og søknader. På denne måten har hun opparbeidet seg en prosjektkompetanse som vi nå vil kunne ha glede av videre. Vi er veldig glade for å ha Silje med oss i 4 nye år og ønsker lykke til med et spennende arbeid!

DSL+ - webinar

Vi feirer årets internasjonale Down syndrom dag med å lansere en kommende webinar-rekke!

Se introduksjonsvideo her:

      Program

Meld deg på webinaret her: https://skjema.uio.no/webinar

Rock your socks!

Utviklingen av visuelt materiale til DSL+-prosjektet - et spesialpedagogisk perspektiv

Tema for innlegget:

• Presentasjon av visuelt materiell som inngår i DSL+ 
• Faktorer som må hensynstas i utviklingen av visuelt materiale til barn med Down syndrom
• Kriterier for utarbeidelse av visuelt materiale 

Presentasjon fra DSL+-seminaret ved Høgskolen i Sørøst-Norge

ASK - tema for logopediens dag

6. Mars var Logopediens dag. Årets tema var Alternativ og Supplerende Kommunikasjon. I artikkelen Lær barn som mangler talespråk sosiale ord (trykk her for å lese artikkelen) kan du lese om betydningen av å gi barn som strever med talespråket tilgang til alternative måter å kommunisere på. Denne artikkelen er basert på et intervju med Kari-Anne B. Næss (leder av DSL+-prosjektet), skrevet av Marika Vartun for Institutt for Spesialpedagogikk ved  det Utdanningsvitenskapelige Fakultet.