An empirical evaluation of an interactive multi-sensory environment for children with disability.

Seventeen students with severe disability (age rang years to 18 years) from one school were assessed on Foundation Outcome Statement Skills (FOS Skills) and subsequently exposed to an interactive multi-sensory enviroment (MSE). Appromaximetly 40 hours of video recordings were made of the 17 participants interacting in the MSE, and a further recordings were made during a school excursion to a local farm school to check for generalisation of behaviour. Six categories of disability were covered in the evaluation namely children with severe intellectual disability, severe intellectual disability/autism, severe intellectual disability/visual impairement, severe intellectual disability/hearing impairement, multiple disability, and multiple disability/visual impairement. A repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed a statistically significant increase in the number of FOS Skills immediately following exposure to the MSE (i.e. following the first session in the MSE). These increases were particularly marked for a small number of participants and for four main FOS Skills. There was also some evidence of generalisation of FOS Skills to an external setting. [AJ].