Week 10 Case Study: Efficacy of Handheld Electronic Visual Supports to Enhance Vocabulary in Children With
ASD
Ganz, J., Boles, M., Goodwyn, F., & Flores, M. (2014). Efficacy of handheld electronic visual supports to enhance
vocabulary in children with asd. Focus on Autism and Other Development Disabilities, 29(1), 3-12. doi:
10.1177/1088357613504991
Personal Reflection
iPad: A amalgamation of what already exists.
The 2014 article by J. Ganz et al. is an investigation of the efficacy of using handheld electronic visual
supports (iPads) to promote vocabulary in children with ASD. With many school districts purchasing iPads
to help both regular and student with special needs, it is important have these studies to test their true value.
This study does meet its goals of improving noun and verb use amongst the three subjects studied. However,
the article is not reproducible or transferable because of the experimental design and/or the manner in which
the information was presented.
The three subjects where developmentally and chronologically heterogeneous. A more homogenous grouping
of children in terms of age, communication skills and developmental milestones would have provided for a
better comparison of the final results. The three subjects are also heterogeneous in the other interventions they
receive, one child receives less speech therapy session per week then the other two. This creates a scenario
where any advances in noun and verb usage cannot be uniquely linked to the use of the iPads with visual
scripts. The experimental design did not clearly identify the characteristics of the baseline that the
intervention was compared to. If it were being compared to the use of the same visual scripts on another
medium then the study would be about the efficacy of using iPads. If it were being compared to the n