Teacher identification of potential communicative acts in children with deafblindness

Abstract: Identification of, and responsiveness to, the communicative attempts of children with developmental delays’ is essential to developing intentional, symbolic communication. The current study was a replication of Keen, Sigafoos, and Woodyatt’s 2005 study titled Teacher Responses to the Communicative Attempts of Children With Autism, with modifications to the participants used in the study. The Inventory of Potential Communicative Acts (IPCA; Sigafoos et al, 2000) was used with three teachers of three children with deafblindness to determine if teachers were able to identify potential communicative acts (PCAs) of their students using the IPCA during an interview session. Additionally, analysis of teacher responsiveness to student PCAs took place during a 30-minute classroom observation session. All three teachers identified a wide range of student PCAs during the IPCA interview and showed high levels of responsiveness to those PCAs during the naturalistic, classroom observation. Low interobserver agreement, clinical implications, and directions for future research are discussed.