New minds, new thoughts – Feedback for the EST presentation at the ComPros seminar with Cathrine Snow

During the spring of 2018, the Faculty of Educational sciences at the University of Oslo invited new and existing research groups into a new application process. One of those newly established groups  is the research group Communicative processes (ComPros) at the Department for Special Needs Education (ISP). The main focus addresses the communicative developmental and learning processes in typical and atypical populations across the lifespan.  Hence, all EST-team members at ISP are members of ComPros. If you want to know more about all the different members and projects, check out the ComPros webside: https://www.uv.uio.no/english/research/groups/compros/index.html.

One of the first events organized by ComPros was a research seminar on Thursday, 6^th of December 2018 with Professor Catherine Snow from Harvard (to learn more about Professor Snow, please follow this link: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty/catherine-snow ). The EST group took the opportunity to present preliminary ideas and challenges for the intervention study (RCT) we are planning. 

From left: Professor Catherine Snow, Åse Sjøstrand & Linn S. Guttormsen

Åse Sjøstrand and Linn S. Guttormsen did a fabulous job to familiarize the audience with the field of stuttering and the specific challenges considering early treatment, such as high percentage of spontaneous recovery, awareness and social-emotional long term consequences and lacks in the research area, as well as summarizing the EST project so far. 

Linn and Åse presented different scenarios for an RCT and acknowledged especially the ethical challenges with a clean control group. Interestingly, and as hoped with such a seminar with experts from overlapping, but different research fields, the feedback addressed other questions and factors than the EST-team usually discusses with our stuttering experts. 

For example, are we very much concerned about possible negative consequences for the children in an untreated control group, where as Professor Snow and others also pointed to possible impact of the much focus on treatment if not needs. That means  – are we possibly inventing a problem that might just be solved by itself based on a high number of natural recovery? Do we induce or increase speech motor difficulties by focusing too much too early on it?  How could this influence our results? Following this, a good suggestion is to discuss the inclusion of awareness assessments for all groups, the number of control groups (if relocation is needed), and not the less – possible contents of a control group receiving something else than stuttering intervention. 

Professor Snows and other participating researchers extensive experience from studies with children with language disorders gave us many new ideas to consider I the further planning of the RCT.  The role of the kindergarten teachers and their possible previous experience with children who stutter should also be taken into consideration when trying to control external factors that may influence the outcome of our intervention study.

The EST team highly appreciated all comments and questions, and really enjoyed having brilliant new minds contributing with new suggestions to our continuous discussions.

For the EST team - Melanie Kirmess