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Team

 

PD-ASAP Team:

  • Becky Dees

  • Laura Kuhn

  • Grace Meisner

  • Rebecca Parkin

  • Maura Tourian

  • Wanqing Zhang

 

Contributors to the development of ASAP:

  • Sally Flagler

  • Michelle Flippin

  • Jessica Kinard

  • Heidi McGuinn Duncombe

  • Twyla Perryman

  • Tracy Williams Lenhardt

  • Kaitlyn Wilson

 

History

The ASAP classroom intervention began with a series of research studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The project was originally called JASP (Joint Attention and Symbolic Play). JASP was developed as an intervention for public schools to use with autistic preschoolers, to teach Joint Attention and Symbolic Play skills. The JASP project also included a series of small studies to determine whether school teachers and therapists found the intervention feasible and useful, and whether children who participated in the intervention showed improvement in their joint attention and symbolic play skills. The JASP intervention was also based on previous research by Dr. Connie Kasari and her colleagues at UCLA, who demonstrated that it is possible to teach these skills to autistic preschoolers, and that children who are taught these key skills develop better language skills over time following the intervention.

JASP, the project under which ASAP was initially developed, was funded by the National Center for Special Education Research, Institute of Education Sciences (R324B07056).

Click here for more information about the development of ASAP and the related research projects

 

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