A researcher from the United Arab Emirates University has developed a tool to evaluate autism in pre-school children (kindergarten) by their teachers, especially since the tools currently used in the region are mostly translated from other languages into Arabic.
The accomplished researcher, Umniah Ghareeb Al-Qahtani, who holds a doctorate from the College of Education at the UAE University, said: “As a mother of an autistic child, I felt responsible towards this group of society and set my sights on providing support to them, out of my belief in the importance of early intervention to reduce the severity of autism symptoms in people.” Children, and because I am fully aware of the importance of the role of teachers in identifying potential cases of autism because they spend enough time with children on a daily basis, I decided to develop an Arabic tool to detect potential cases of autism in children by their teachers.”
She added: “This tool is the first of its kind in the Arab world, as all the tools used for this purpose in the country were developed in Western countries based on the symptoms that appear on their children, while no focus was placed on applying these assessment tools to an Arab sample of children, which may It affects the evaluation results.
For her part, Dr. Maria Avstratopoulou, Head of the Department of Special and Gifted Education at the UAE University, who is supervising this study, explained: “This pioneering research study works to cover a large gap in the field of early detection of autism by developing an autism checklist in the pre-school stage ( PAC), which is specially designed to be in line with the cultural standards of the Arab Gulf countries.
She pointed out that incorporating the cultural characteristics of the Gulf region into the study adds depth and importance to the evaluation tool, through the use of a qualitative study method and the involvement of special education teachers in this process, as the researchers demonstrated a precise approach to developing the tools.
It is worth noting that the assessment tool (PAC) was developed based on a sample of 381 Emirati children, from the various emirates of the country, who were evaluated by their teachers and the necessary studies were conducted to ensure the validity and effectiveness of the tool in assessing the risk of autism in children.
(PAC) is an assessment tool consisting of 29 symptoms of autism that has been verified to be effective for use by pre-school (kindergarten) teachers. The higher the score a student obtains using the tool, the greater the risk of developing an autism spectrum disorder. This requires teachers to refer it to a specialist for verification and final evaluation.
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