For the cases when more specialist input is required, SCERTS® (i.e. Social Communication, Emotional Regulation, and Transactional Support) model will allow going through the comprehensive assessment of the social and emotional understanding as well as emotional regulation strategies the child has developed already, visually present the results and create a detailed plan for the further progress.
Following SCERTS assessment and measurements, practitioners working with the child can start teaching from where a child is at – not where they should be age-wise or presuming that they can’t do anything at all.
The SCERTS® framework assesses essential parts of the child’s self and mutual emotional regulation that need working on, for instance what are the positive/negative basic emotional states the child reliably understands already, and which ones need further attention, any situational/generalized advanced emotion understanding, the use of graded emotions and ability to change emotional expression based on partner’s feedback, his use of nonverbal cues of emotional expression. The assessment will look at the child’s communication patterns from several different angles. It will consider the level of social attention present already, like his ability to reliably follow a distal point.
Sensory Systems Assessment
Once a child is diagnosed with the “intense world syndrome” or autism, behavioural interventions aimed at altering the child’s verbal and non-verbal responses may come into focus, while his sensory needs are often ignored. Hence, autism-specific sensory perceptual difficulties may remain “invisible” and undetected for a long time. When, however, autistic children receive an opportunity to develop in an environment where their sensory issues are addressed, they might respond to the social interventions better than when they grow in autism units where the main emphasis is on training specific behaviours. Moreover, as all the senses are integrated, addressing a particular sensory deficiency has been known for enabling a child to cope with other perceptual issues to such an extent that she was no longer considered autistic.
Sensory systems assessment is probably the best way to clarify the sensory experiences and choose appropriate intervention strategies that will work well with the nature of the child’s strengths and weaknesses. The assessment is particularly popular for identifying essential perceptual phenomena which are not detected by the conventional auditory and visual acuity tests.
As we analyse the child’s past and present self-regulating strategies in the context of his natural environment, we can decide on the methods which could facilitate his/her social-emotional intelligence alongside considering essential accommodations which could improve his/her wellbeing and allow the child to perform at school or another social setting more effectively.
Parents /or carers are offered to complete the sensory systems questionnaire which will look at the child’s sensory history and current behaviour patterns. Following the initial assessment, a consultation will be offered to discuss the behaviours and give further advice.
Social Processing Dynamic Assessment
Socially Smart programme is developed to teach social competence explicitly to autistic children. The programme starts with the Dynamic Assessment of the social processing, an informal way to look at the child’s collaborative thinking, to identify key communication difficulties the child experiences, to decide whether he or she will benefit from the advanced social learning programme and choose the core treatment strategies to help the child eventually manage social interpretation and social communication more successfully. I recommend going through the assessment in the child’s natural environments to avoid unnecessary stress and reduce social anxiety during the first meeting.