Follow the conferense "Communication in individuals with Down syndrome - which future does the research predict?" here

Foto: Maria de Fatima Campos

Nb.no/direkte

Conference on Communication in Individuals with Down Syndrome

The University of Oslo (the DSL+ project), in cooperation with Norwegian network for Down syndrome, the Norwegian Research Forum on Down syndrome and The National Library of Norway, invites you to an international conference on Down-syndrome and communication. The conference will be held at The National Library of Norway 31.08.17 and 01.09.17.

Illustration: Colourbox

Program

AUGUST 31^st

Time	Talk
09.00	Registration
10.00 – 10.30	Welcome
10.30 – 11.30	Charles Hulme: Interventions to improve reading and language skills in children with Down Syndrome
11.30 – 12.00	Silje Hokstad: Findings from a systematic review of language interventions for children with Down syndrome
12.00 – 13.00	LUNCH (registered participants only)
13.00 – 13.30	Christopher J. Lemons: Literacy Instruction for Children with Down Syndrome
13.30 – 14.00	Kari-Anne Næss & Liz Smith: Vocabulary, Phonological Awareness, and Letter Knowledge Promote Reading in Children with Down Syndrome
14.00 – 14.30	Liv Inger Engevik, Kari-Anne B. Næss, & Bente Hagtvet: Cognitive Stimulation of Pupils With Down Syndrome: A Study of Inferential Talk During Book-Sharing
14.30 – 15.00	BREAK with picture book exhibition
15.00 – 15.30	Ingrid Holmboe Høibo: Quality in newer wordless picture books
15.30 – 16.00	Sara E Wood, Jennifer Wishart, Claire Timmins, William J. Hardcastle, & Joanne Cleland: The use of electropalatography (EPG) in the treatment of motor speech disorders in children with Down’s syndrome: A randomized controlled trial.
16.00	Conclusion
18.00	Reception Oslo City Hall (registered participants only)

SEPTEMBER 1st

Time	Talk
09.15 – 10.15	Ann Kaiser: Toward a Phenotypic Specific Early Communication Interventions for Children with Down Syndrome
10.15 – 10.30	BREAK
10.30 – 11.00	Liz Smith, Silje Hokstad, & Kari-Anne Næss: A systematic review of language interventions for children with Down syndrome: what are the most effective approaches?
11.00 – 11.30	Bernadette Witecy: Language comprehension in children, adolescents and adults with Down syndrome
11.30 – 12.00	Field of practise in 90 min Line Avers: When working on speech - can we be more concrete? Nina Skauge: New booklets make the difficult a little easier
12.00 – 13.00	LUNCH (registered participants only)
13.00 – 14.00	Field of practise in 90 minutes, cont. Karianne Hjørnevik Nes: Inclusive education in fifth grade public school with language as a basic skill Britt-Hege Wærnes: Reading and learning intervention for children with Down syndrome from kindergarten to first grade. Henrik Wærnes: Systematic speech intervention with the Karlstadmodel stimulation plate- a practice story Karen Knudsen Synnes: Why sign-language is a key to communication and participation to people with Down Syndrome Ellen Romstad: From reading and writing to communicating – in and outside the classroom
14.00 – 14.30	BREAK with picture book exhibition
14.30 – 15.00	Kari-Anne Næss, Egil Nygaard, Johanne Ostad, & Sol Lyster: Vocabulary in children with Down syndrome
15.00 – 15.30	Anne-Stine Dolva, Marit Kollstad, & Jo Kleiven: Language and communication characteristics - teens as informants in research
15.30 – 16.00	Conclusion and the future in Down syndrome research

For further information about the conference see : 

http://www.uv.uio.no/isp/om/aktuelt/arrangementer/communication-in-individuals-with-down-syndrome---.html

My Academic Summer - Randomisation, Confidence Intervals and Forest Plots

Today I visited the Psychology Departement at Cardiff University for a crash course in statistics with Craig Hedge, PdD in experimental psychology. Craig is currently working on a Meta-analysis on reliability studies in cognitive control and is the go to guy when you are struggling with statistics. Liz and I had a few specific requests; we wanted to know how Craig carries out randomisation procedures using MatLab, we wanted him to explain confidence intervals and when to use them and we wanted to learn us about forest plotts. 

Randomisation: Craig has previously carried out the randomisation procedures for the DSL+-project. When carrying out a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) the participants are randomly placed in either a experimental group or a control group. The process of group placement is called randomisation and should always be done by a third party not involved in the study of question. Neither me nor Liz knew how this procedure was actually carried out, and therefore asked Craig to show us. Using MathLab this turns out to be a relatively straight forward procedure. Knowledge that might come in handy one day!

Before it got complicated...

Confidence Intervals: Next we wanted to understand confidence intervals - what do they tell us and when should they be used? Confidence intervals are used to describe the amount of uncertainty associated with a sample estimate of a population parameter. People interpret them as a measure of precision - in principle if you were to run an experiment 100 times a 95% confidence interval would contain the "true" population value in 95 of those experiments.

If you use IQ as an example the average of the population is 100. If you tested the IQ of a sample of 30 people you might get a confidence interval of 93 - 103. If you repeated the procedure with another sample of 30 people you might get a confidence interval of 98 - 110. If you did this 100 times, you would expect the confidence interval to contain the true value (100, population mean) 95 times. The remaining five times would then have a confidence interval not containing the true value (100, population mean), e.g. 101 - 111.

You can read about confidence intervals in the article; The fallacy of placing confidence in confidence intervals (Morey, Hoekstra, Rouder, Lee and Wagemakers, 2016).

The face of confusion....

So how can confidence intervals be used? One example is when presenting results from a meta-analysis using a forest plot. Two things to take from this is a) if the confidence interval goes through the vertical "0" line the results of the studie is non significant and as such b) if the confidence interval is on the right side of the vertical "0" line the results of the studie is significant. The diamond in the bottom is the average mean of all the included studies. 

Illustration image, Wikipedia commons

Thanks to Craig Hedge for having us visit!

- Silje and Liz -

My Academic Summer

As I wrote about in one of my blog posts a while ago, I have been so fortunate as to receive a travel grant from The Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (SYLFF). This grant is used for a two-week research stay at the University of Bristol, England. As I write this I am at the beginning of my two-week stay in England and I have two exiting and eventful weeks ahead of me. Amongst other things I will be presenting the DSL+-project focusing on my masters project on implementation at the School of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol and at the Departement of Psychology at Bournemouth University.  

The First Day of My Academic Summer - Cardiff Bay

As such this summer will be something out of the ordinary! 

I will keep you posted...

With the best wishes for the summer

 - Silje -