Visual Supports for People with Autism: A Guide for Parents and Professionals

A practical guide to using visual supports – activity schedules, graphic organizers, color highlighting and coding, Social Stories, flip books, photographs, calendars and more – to improve academic performance, behavior, social interactions and self-help skills in people with autism. The authors explain how visual supports can be effective in making learning easier for children with autism in areas where they may have particular difficulty, such as language learning, (understanding idioms, word order and conversational skills), memory, attending to a task, temporal-sequential skills, motivation, and social skills. There are general tips on what to consider when making supports: durability, portability, age appropriateness, ease of use and more. A chapter also discusses how to gradually wean students from the supports and work toward greated independence. Dozens of black & white photos and an 8 page color insert illustrate how simple these visual aids are to use and create.

Marlene J. Cohen is the Director of Adult and Transitional Services at the Douglass Developmental Disabilities Center and a part-time lecturer for the Graduate School of Education, both located at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Donna L. Sloan is the Assistant Director of Adult and Transitional Services at the Douglass Developmental Disabilities Center. Both authors are Board Certified Behavior Analysts working with adolescents and adults on the autism spectrum. Dr. Cohen and Ms. Sloan live in central New Jersey.