Parents play a vital role in supporting children with learning disabilities, but little is known about their understanding of this diagnosis. The experiences of parents with the diagnostic process and the services their children receive post-diagnosis vary widely. Parents who participated in this study reported that they understand learning…

A recent UK study found that 28% of autistic children were diagnosed with autism after starting secondary school, a stage where self-concept and social identity are the main developmental tasks. This study uses Foucauldian Discourse Analysis to explore the discourses ten girls with a diagnosis of autism use in their constructions of self-concept…

Introduction: Mental health concerns have been noted to be highly prevalent for youth with intellectual disability (ID), with or without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The purpose of the current study was to examine a Canadian sample of youth with ID, with or without ASD, to explore caregiver-reported percentages, predictors, and treatment…

Purpose: This research aimed to identify reliable tasks discriminating French-speaking adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD) from their peers with typical language (TL) and to assess which linguistic domains represent areas of particular weakness in DLD. Unlike English, morphosyntax has not been identified as a special area of…

The prevalence of autism/autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been increasing across the world. Previous studies in Norway reported, that the prevalence rate for 0-10-year-old children is 1 in 166, and in the case of 11-year-old children it is 1 in 125. Moreover, another nationwide study discovered that 1 in 192 males and 1 in 695 females between…

Available statistics and literature indicate that Somali-Canadian youth face unique challenges in their everyday lives. Somali students have a 36.7 % dropout rate (Jibril, 2011). Somali-Canadian community members in Edmonton contend that Somali-Canadian students are labelled with behavioural or cognitive disorders, diagnoses that do not take into…

Systematic reviews have traditionally focused on internal validity, while external validity often has been overlooked. In this study, we systematically reviewed determinants of external validity in the accumulated randomized controlled trials of social skills group interventions for children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. We…

Previous research linking school disruption with mental health problems has largely relied on assessments of academic achievement to measure school disruption. Early disruptive classroom behaviour (e.g., conflict with school staff, negative attitudes toward school), however, may precipitate poor academic performance and may stem from emerging…

Background: Although autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are generally considered lifelong disabilities, literature suggests that a minority of individuals with an ASD will lose the diagnosis. However, the existence of this phenomenon, as well as its frequency and interpretation, is still controversial: were they misdiagnosed initially, is this a…

This study examines the academic abilities of children and adolescents who were once diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, but who no longer meet diagnostic criteria for this disorder. These individuals have achieved social and language skills within the average range for their ages, receive little or no school support, and are referred to…

Eight males and four females with an Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) diagnosis of autism (mean age of 16.3 years) and severe intellectual disability (IQ < 40) were individually matched to controls on the basis of chronological age, gender, and nonverbal IQ. The dependent measure was the Diagnostic Assessment for the Severely…

This study was conducted to examine the types and proportions of identified clinical findings among children with and without disabilities. Using data from the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (CIS), this study compared 7672 children aged 0 to 15 years (n=1067 with disabilities and n=6605 without disabilities) who were…