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Arts, culture, and entertainment venues routinely serve children with special needs. For this needs assessment, we surveyed a range of venues to understand the knowledge and confidence of staff who work with children with participation challenges, and explored how occupational therapists could help them optimize children's participation. Significant relationships existed between knowledge of conditions and confidence in meeting the needs of children with participation challenges. This also revealed what participants felt they needed in order to provide quality experiences, including facility assessments, proactive preparation, program development, and staff education. Participants believed collaboration with occupational therapists could help achieve this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: Increasing usage of cultural arts venues by children with special needs has created a need to optimize participation planning. A team of three occupational therapy graduate students and one faculty researcher was invited to provide a local children's theater staff with training for supporting children with special needs. The team aimed to determine how their collaboration with the theater could contribute to understandings of best practices in community participation planning.Method: The team participated in theater events, conducted a facility assessment, interviewed staff members with varying role responsibilities, and surveyed staff before and after conducting a participation-planning workshop.Results: The collaborative approach to participation planning utilized strategies that provided practical applications for theater staff, including planning for sensory processing and regulation challenges, and providing staff with behavior management and communication tips for interacting with children.Conclusion: Through training, staff participation planning evolved from reacting to present-day problems to proactively planning for future initiatives. Staff expressed desires to have some of their own members become in-house experts for participation planning, allowing others to pursue the theater's mission: providing live children's theater performances and programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hearing in laboratory animals is a topic that traditionally has been the domain of the auditory researcher. However, hearing loss and exposure to various environmental sounds can lead to changes in multiple organ systems, making what laboratory animals hear of consequence for researchers beyond those solely interested in hearing. For example, several inbred mouse strains commonly used in biomedical research (e.g., C57BL/6, DBA/2, and BALB/c) experience a genetically determined, progressive hearing loss that can lead to secondary changes in systems ranging from brain neurochemistry to social behavior. Both researchers and laboratory animal facility personnel should be aware of both strain and species differences in hearing in order to minimize potentially confounding variables in their research and to aid in the interpretation of data. Independent of genetic differences, acoustic noise levels in laboratory animal facilities can have considerable effects on the inhabitants. A large body of literature describes the nonauditory impact of noise on the biology and behavior of various strains and species of laboratory animals. The broad systemic effects of noise exposure include changes in endocrine and cardiovascular function, sleep-wake cycle disturbances, seizure susceptibility, and an array of behavioral changes. These changes are determined partly by species and strain; partly by noise intensity level, duration, predictability, and other characteristics of the sound; and partly by animal history and exposure context. This article reviews some of the basic strain and species differences in hearing and outlines how the acoustic environment affects different mammals.