Types of Teams
Because autism may impact a person in many different areas, professionals with different areas of expertise participate on the assessment team. Those areas may include:
- Developmental history
- Health history
- Adaptive skills
- Psychological
- Communication
- Cognitive and achievement
- Motor
- Sensory
When professionals in the schools from different fields work to conduct autism evaluations they may organize the work in different ways.
The Transdisciplinary approach is especially helpful in complex assessments such as autism evaluations. In this approach the members of the team collect some of their information separately. They may send out different checklists, make classroom observations, or complete some direct assessment tasks with the student on their own. The thing that sets this approach apart is that at some point members of the team together directly work with the student. They may collaborate in giving a formal assessment instrument, interviewing the student, or completing a social problem-solving task with the student.
Transdisciplinary assessments often result in strong recommendations that are more readily applied to the “real world.”
Transdisciplinary assessment gives the team an opportunity to build on the information gathered by other professionals in real time.
- The speech pathologist may suggest a communication strategy (giving sentence starters, writing something down) to improve the assessment.
- The psychologist may suggest a reinforcement strategy (giving breaks to play with a favorite toy or dance to a preferred song).
- The occupational therapist may implement a sensory strategy (try closing the blinds to change the lighting in the room, try giving the student something crunchy to chew on to see if it helps them to focus).
Transdisciplinary teams also meet to integrate their contributions to the assessment and to come to a consensus regarding their observations.