Two pictorial tools for assessing the attitudes of Taiwanese male high school students with intellectual disabilities toward sexually offensive behavior.

The purpose of this study was to develop two pictorial tools for assessing the attitudes of Taiwanese male senior high school students with intellectual disabilities toward sexually offensive behavior, focusing on cognitive distortion and victim empathy. A total of 181 male high school students at special education schools participated in this study. The validity and reliability were examined using exploratory factor analysis and Cronbach's alpha coefficient. For the cognitive distortion scale, 18 items grouped into three factors, rationalization, denial, and victim blaming, and explained 69.72% of the variance; for the victim empathy scale, 12 items grouped into two factors, the victim's feelings when the offensive behavior is perpetrated by another, and the victim's feelings when the offensive behavior is perpetrated by oneself, and explained 68.00% of the variance. The reliability was .96 for the cognitive distortion scale and .93 for the victim empathy scale. In conclusion, the two scales developed in this research were found to be reliable and valid tools for evaluating male students' attitudes toward sexually offensive behavior, and can also be used as reference material for courses in sex education.

The development of a multimedia online language assessment tool for young children with autism.

This study aimed to provide early childhood special education professionals with a standardized and comprehensive language assessment tool for the early identification of language learning characteristics (e.g., hyperlexia) of young children with autism. In this study, we used computer technology to develop a multi-media online language assessment tool that presents auditory or visual stimuli. This online comprehensive language assessment consists of six subtests: decoding, homographs, auditory vocabulary comprehension, visual vocabulary comprehension, auditory sentence comprehension, and visual sentence comprehension. Three hundred typically developing children and 35 children with autism from Tao-Yuan County in Taiwan aged 4-6 participated in this study. The Cronbach α values of the six subtests ranged from .64 to .97. The variance explained by the six subtests ranged from 14% to 56%, the current validity of each subtest with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised ranged from .21 to .45, and the predictive validity of each subtest with WISC-III ranged from .47 to .75. This assessment tool was also found to be able to accurately differentiate children with autism up to 92%. These results indicate that this assessment tool has both adequate reliability and validity. Additionally, 35 children with autism have completed the entire assessment in this study without exhibiting any extremely troubling behaviors. However, future research is needed to increase the sample size of both typically developing children and young children with autism and to overcome the technical challenges associated with internet issues.