Cetiner, Tugce;
(2024)
An early intervention programme (AiMS) for developing handwriting skills in young autistic children.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
The PhD programme of work was carried out to develop a novel parent- mediated home-based motor skill intervention to support handwriting in young autistic children aged between 4 and 5 – it is called “Autism Early Intervention for Motor Skills (AiMS)”. In Study 1, a systematic review investigated the critical ingredients of existing autism early interventions, with the main finding showing there was only one home-based, parent-mediated motor skill early intervention to support young autistic children. For Study 2, a survey examined parents/caregivers’ beliefs and knowledge about motor skills, and the motor skill activities they used to support young children. The results indicated that parents believed motor skills to be more important than literacy skills. They also had greater knowledge of motor skills compared to literacy and maths skills, but they used fewer motor skill activities. The Study 3 feasibility investigation was developed from Study 1 and 2, with the first part being the development of an AiMS workbook, parent training videos and instruction sheets. AiMS was underpinned by the theoretical principles associated with motor learning and practice-specificity, which formed the AB/BA randomised crossover experimental design. Autistic children performed fifteen tracing activities per day, five days a week for six weeks. Letter writing performance was evaluated in acquisition and transfer. All children improved letter writing performance, but importantly practice-specificity underpinned significantly better motor learning of novel Gokturk letters and the transfer to unpractised English letters. These results are the first to show practice-specificity in young autistic children and confirmed the feasibility of AiMS as a parent-mediated home-based motor skill intervention.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | An early intervention programme (AiMS) for developing handwriting skills in young autistic children |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2024. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Psychology and Human Development |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10194249 |
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