Psy 398 Advanced Practicum

Psychology 398, Advanced Autism Practicum, is designed to produce students with an advanced level of techniques and skills in working with special population, autistics. The students who register for this class have completed PSY 357, Special Population Practicum, in the pre-primary impaired classroom at Croyden Avenue School previously, and worked as a behavioral technician in a one-on-one discrete trial setting.

Advanced practicum students are selected from students who have taken the regular practicum at Croyden Avenue School. Related staff, such as a system manager, who is in charge of the advanced practicum, TAs who have taught students' seminar and monitored their performance at Croyden Avenue School, and the classroom teacher Carmen, who is in charge of running the special classroom at Croyden Avenue School, decide on advanced practicum students based on their performance in the classroom.

Their task is to work in the classroom with an assigned autistic child and attend a regular seminar meeting outside the classroom. They are required to complete a project that involves developing a new procedure for an autistic child in the classroom, dealing with the red dotted procedure, doing literature reviews, and doing a powerpoint presentation about their project. A procedure is red dotted when a child has problems in a procedure and cannot move onto the next phase in the procedure. Advanced students are required to attend to the problems in the procedure and write subphases if needed. Developing, implementing, evaluating, and recycling a new procedure is the other major tasks for advanced practicum students.

Based on their experience and knowledge, the advanced practicum students are required to develop a new procedure for a child in the classroom. The new procedure goes over several revisions by the system manager, classroom teacher, TAs in the classroom, and advanced practicum students themselves. After the revisions, the new procedures are added to the procedure book that the other regular practicum students who work with the child can then follow.

Advanced practicum students train regular practicum students on working on the new procedures as needed. In the seminar meeting outside the classroom, all the issues raised at Croyden are discussed and the classroom teacher Carmen Joanitis attends the meeting every other week for discussion and to give feedback.