Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist (ATEC)
This is an on-line assessment tool, a little ambiguous in places, but very helpful all the same. It was designed to help evaluate the success or otherwise of any intervention.
You are required to tick boxes about your child's issues and it calculates the score for you at the end. It's not how high or low the score is that counts, just the overall number and the breakdown in these four main area's
- Speech Language & communication
- Sensory
- Behaviour
- Health
Click here to go to the ATEC site www.autismeval.com/ari-atec/
It is helpful (in the future) to have a baseline and it may also be used to identify which of the four areas's to target for interventions, though most treatments have benefits in more than one area. Complete the on-line form and print out the results. You can also choose to receive the results as an email - file it somewhere safe (or make a folder called ATEC's) so you can use it to evaluate any intervention you might try in the future.
Make a few notes on how you decided to answer any questions that seemed ambiguous for example, did you include PEC's cards as language or did you feel that it meant spoken words? This is helpful so that you can be consistent when you complete the assessment again to evaluate interventions or just to see any changes over passage of time.
You could also ask friends, family, teacher (or someone else who knows your child well) to complete the ATEC. Don't expect the scores to be the same as yours, as before, this is about providing you with a tool to measure change. Comparisons are not for your views versus another persons, but your views, versus your previous view!
TIP: Get yourself a brightly coloured plastic expanding file. Tesco's and ASDA do these for less than £2. No hole punch needed, just pop stuff like ATEC score sheets in there to keep to safe. Barbie pink or fluorescent yellow means it will be harder to lose your file!