Customer

Ivymount School and Programs

Named twice by the U.S. Department of Education as a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence, Ivymount is a non-public, special education day school with an integrated approach to learning in Rockville, MD.  Founded in 1961, Ivymount serves children with disabilities including developmental delays, health impairments, speech and language deficits and autism spectrum disorders. The school is building expertise in using Affectiva Q Sensors now with the long-term goal of providing students with autism spectrum disorders a new way to self-regulate by acting on the warning signs of outbursts.

Challenge

Monica Adler Werner, director of Ivymount's Model Asperger Program (MAP), heads ongoing development of a social learning-curriculum that emphasizes problem solving, self advocacy and self regulation in students with Asperger Syndrome.

Students with Asperger's can experience difficult moments that disrupt their ability to function and learn in a group. Feelings of social overload can trigger behaviors ranging from disengagement to full-blown meltdowns that include aggression and self-injurious behavior.

The MAP students are articulate but have trouble understanding and describing the emotions that precede an outburst. Also, their external affects are difficult to read, which makes it challenging for teachers to help them select the right interventions at the right time.

Key Activities

In November 2010, Ms. Werner, in collaboration with Children’s National Medical Center’s Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders, and supported by a National Institutes of Health grant, is launching the first step of a long-term project using the Affectiva Q Sensor.

Up to 40 children in groups of three to five at a time will wear the Q Sensor, a wireless, mobile biosensor, to measure sympathetic nervous system activation during normal classroom activities. The program will use this initial data for three main purposes:

1. To better understand the antecedents to escalated behavior and flag signals that teachers may be missing.
2. To correlate the data with students' self-reports and external observation as a discussion point for helping students monitor themselves better. For instance, a student may rate herself as feeling frustrated, the teacher may observe that the student looks fine and the Q Sensor may display that she's "off-the-chart." The visual data should help the child make a link between how she's experiencing a feeling and how she's reporting it. It also helps externalize the discussion so that it's about information, not a social discussion, Ms. Werner says.
3. To develop for each child interventions based on hard evidence.

Bottom Line

Real-time problem-solving before students get overloaded.

Future

Once the Q Sensor usage is successful in the Ivymount MAP program, staff plan to explore possible uses in other Ivymount programs, which include classes with non-verbal children.

In addition, Ms. Werner plans to use the Q Sensors to establish a rating scale for emotional self-awareness related to alexithymia, which is deficiency in understanding, processing or describing emotions. This rating scale could support national and international research and strategies for evidence-based intervention.

Contact

Molly L Whalen
(301) 469-0223 x106
mhwhalen@ivymount.org

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