What is the Autism SIG Student Research Award?

Each year, a committee of ABAI Autism SIG members presents the ABAI Autism SIG Student Research Award to a graduate or undergraduate student who is the first author on a poster presented at ABAI. Graduate or undergraduate students who are the first authors on an autism-related posters accepted by ABAI are invited to submit their posters for consideration. Doctoral level SIG members are recruited each year at the SIG business meeting to serve as judges.

Posters are reviewed by the panel of judges on the following criteria:
•    Are the objectives clear and logical extensions of the literature?
•    Is the method and design appropriate given the objectives outlined?
•    Are the results and their implications appropriately discussed?
•    Does the research make a contribut ion to the field?

The student research award winner receives a framed award and gift certificate to the ABAI bookstore. Further, the winner’s poster is printed in the Autism SIG newsletter, which reaches hundreds of professionals in the autism field.

The 2011 Winner of the Autism SIG Annual student Research Award

The Autism SIG would like to congratulate the winner of our annual student research award. Her poster is titled "The Effects of Prompting, Reinforcement, and Script-Fading Procedures to Teach Children with Autism a Generalized Repertoire of Initiating Bids for Joint Attention." Sandra Gomes is a doctoral candidate in Applied Behavior Analysis at Caldwell College.  She has been applying the science of applied behavior analysis with individuals with autism for nearly 10 years.  Sandra is currently an Assistant Director at Somerset Hills Learning Institute a dissemination site of the Princeton Child Development Institute.  She provides training to staff and parents and make programming decisions for students.

Her research interests include joint attention, social skills, food refusal, and stimulus control.

She is very grateful for her advisor Dr. Sharon Reeve and to her thesis committee who helped her refine her research question as to how to effectively teach joint attention skills to children with autism.  In the future, she plan to continue to do research in the area of joint attention and social skills.

The 2010 Winner of the Autism SIG Annual Student Research Award

The Autism SIG would like to congratulate the winner of our annual student research award. Ms. Nitasha Dickes  of the Munroe-Meyer Institute for Genetics and Rehabilitation  and the University of Nebraska Medical Center. The judges of the ABAI Autism SIG's 13th Annual Student Research Contest have chosen her poster , "An Evaluation of Procedural Integrity for Inexperienced Therapists via Computer-Assisted Instruction or One-on-One Instruction" as the winner of this year's award. As the winner of this year's award, her study will be printed in the next issue of the Autism SIG newsletter.  In addition, she will be awarded a certificate honoring your achievement at the 2011 ABAI Autism SIG meeting in Denver, Colorado.