Critique Of Methods And Results Article Review

Article Critique on Learning in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Introduction
Foti, Mazzone, et al. wrote an article on learning by observation in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The main purpose of the study was to determine the capacity of children with autism spectrum disorder to detect visuomotor sequence by trial and error through observations. The study team failed to state their problem statement making the reader more confused on what exactly the research aimed at testing. The study According to authors, an observer develops acquisition of an action of another person performing a complex task that ends up limiting the time consuming process of trial and error. The study tested the hypothesis that: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are likely to experience deficit in learning by observation skills such as imitating, attending, and understanding contingencies.

The study investigated 20 children with ASD that was compared with typical developing children. Respondents were matched according to IQ, gender, and chronological age on tasks of learning visuomotor sequence by either observation or trial and error. The method used to diagnose ASD children was discovered in 1994, ten years before the study was done. The diagnosis process questions the accuracy because newer diagnosing plans are available that are more accurate and efficient. Additionally, the study did not mention the exact number of participants for children with typical development. Repeated tests were conducted to investigate the effect of sequence trials in three phases, the detection phase (DP), the exercise phase (EP), and the automization phase (AP) (Foti et al. 2014). Three phases seemed not adequate to get desired results for the study according to the study objectives. The study team could have introduced a fourth phase that used normal children in order to conduct a better comparison. On the other hand, the data was analyzed using the normality test and the homoscedasticity tests that were compared using the analysis of variance. Basically, the team should have included a t-test because two groups of participants were used and the study would use mean ages to test the hypothesis.
Secondly, the analysis of study results showed some faults. The study team hypothesized that ASD children experience some difficulties in learning by observation but the results indicated that ASD children were as efficient as TD children after repeated trials (Foti et al. 2014). These results questions the plan used to detect children with ASD since it seemed out dated. Secondly, the study observed that ASD made more errors compared to TD children during the third phase, an indication that ASD children lack learning by observation skills after repeated times. The results prove that ASD children become tired faster that TD children leading to major errors in the third error. On the other hand, authors failed to give recommendations for future research in the article but concentrated on the study outcome and its implications to the society.

Conclusion

The research hypothesis was achieved but the method used to write the article was not valid. The research team never mentioned their objectives and the reader had to go through the whole paper to identify the objectives. Additionally, there was lack of the statement problem that gives the reader a direction on what the research team aimed at investigating and the reason why they carried out the study. On the other hand, the methodology used was not much valid and required more statistical interferences such as t-test to ensure all variables were tested and comparisons made for accurate results. Finally, the article never analyzed results using statistical tools such as graphs, charts, and tables that make comparison easier and efficient.

Reference

Foti, F. et al. (2014). Learning by observation in children with autism spectrum disorder.
Psychological Medicine, 44, 2437-2447.