Piloting a Novel Daily Living Skills Assessment in Autistic Adolescents and Young Adults.

ABSTRACT

Why is this an important issue?: For autistic adolescents and young adults, one of the most important predictors of success after high school are daily living skills (DLS), which are a component of adaptive functioning (AF), or the ability to operate independently when engaged in day-to-day tasks. However, most of the measures used to assess these abilities are parent- or child-report questionnaires, which may lack objectivity. What was the purpose of this study?: The Computerized Functional Skills Assessment and Training program (CFSAT) is an innovative software program that was designed to teach people how to perform daily tasks that require the use of technology. This study piloted two CFSAT modules in a sample of autistic adolescents and young adults. The researchers wanted to see whether the program could be completed by the autistic participants and whether their performance related to an existing measure of DLS and other cognitive measures known to be related to AF. What did the researchers do?: This study piloted the assessment portion of two CFSAT modules in 25 autistic and 25 non-autistic adolescents and young adults to investigate whether it might be a useful measure of DLS skills in autistic individuals. The assessment portion of the program gives participants tasks to complete on a virtual ATM and Metro Ticket Kiosk and records time to completion and accuracy. Participants also used a questionnaire to self-report DLS and general AF and performed cognitive tasks. What were the results of the study?: All but one autistic participant were able to complete both tasks. The autistic group made more errors but did not take more time to complete the tasks compared with the non-autistic group. Performance on the CFSAT was related to self-reported DLS scores on a questionnaire and to scores on cognitive tasks. What do these findings add to what was already known?: Previous work recommended computer-based DLS programs for autistic individuals. Since our results suggest the CFSAT is a viable computer-based program of DLS for autistic adults, CFSAT could help fill a need for DLS tools that are more applicable to real life than currently available questionnaires. Findings provide preliminary support that the CFSAT assessment measures DLS and could be a promising program to further study. What are potential weaknesses in the study?: Weaknesses of our work include that the measures used in this study only assessed two specific tasks encountered in daily living. Data on participants' real-life experience were not fully collected, so the association between the amount of real-life experience on these tasks and computer task performance will require further study. No data asking whether the tasks studied are useful for autistic adolescents and adults were collected. The study was small and consisted of relatively fewer women, which means that results will need to be replicated in a larger sample. How will these findings help autistic adults now or in the future?: This work could eventually pave the way for interventions that improve DLS (including the training version of the CFSAT) that may be helpful for teaching autistic individuals technology-related functional skills.