Nesrhtens…..

As social deficits are one of the main impairments with children with autism spectrum disorders, there has been put a large effort in developing effective interventions in this area. And the later years the focus has been on the early social development, as they appear to be crucial for the normal development of children.

Another focus has been on embedding the intervention into more typical environments and one central element of this has bee the incorporation of natural rewards. This has shown to strengthen the response-reinforcer relationship and are especially helpful in encouraging social communication (e.g. Koegel and Koegel, 2006).

In a recent study by Koegel, Vernon and Koegel published in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders the effect of embedding social interactions into reinforcers on social initiations in children with autism was investigated. The data from this study support the notion that embedded social interaction in reinforcers increases several important early social behaviors.

The teaching of precurrent behaviors are from an operant perspective behaviors that increase the effectiveness of a subsequent (current) behavior in obtaining a reinforcer (Skinner, 1968). And applies to many areas in teaching children with autism, as well as other children and youths.

As many of the proposed curriculums (e.g. Lovaas, Leaf & McEachin and others) are built to teach precurrent behaviors before more complex skills are thaugt, the difference between a good designed treatment protocol and a not so good designed treatment protocol, may be due to a poor analysis of precurrent skills for the individual child.

Every child receiving ABA-treatment needs individually designed curriculum, and experience shows that there are a great variability in how much teaching each child needs in the precurrent behaviors for the more complex skills in a program. So a good analysis and efficient procedures is needed.

Levingston, Neef and Cihon has published a study in this volume of Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis on the effect of teaching precurrent behaviors on their solution of multiplication and division word problems. As the study shows good effect and efficiency it should be systematically tested out on other areas as well.

In a recent published study, Murphy and Barnes-Holmes, showed successfully establishing derived mands in children with autism in the relation of more-less. This study is published in Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis.

This is an important contribution to research on language teaching for children with autism. To effectively establish a flexible mand repertoire in children with autism, an approach that needs to directly train every mand that the child requires will not be sufficient. So by developing procedures to teach derived transfer would improve the behavior analytic approach to teach children with autism further.

In this study the researcher managed to establish derived manding with three, e.g four, children diagnosed with autism. And they arranged control conditions that support their findings. Showing that teaching derived manding through conditional discrimination are possible with children with autism.

There exist a number of studies showing the effectiveness of video modelling for persons with autism spectrum disorders. The has been published a studies showing effectiveness in teaching a wide variety of skills, from social skills, self-help skills and community-skills, for details seeVideo Modelling And Behaviour Analysis: A Guide for Teaching Social Skills to Children With Autism.

In this issue of Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Marcus and Wilder published a study comparing the effects on peer video modeling and self video modeling. Self modeling being when the child is watching her or him self performing the task, and peer modeling when the children watch peers performing the tasks.

According to the authors of this article, they have only found one previous study comparing these procedures (Sherer et al., 2001). So this is an area that should be further investigated.

This study found that the self modeling procedure was the most effective, both in reaching the criteria at all, and how fast the children reached the criteria.

In the latest issue of Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis Lang et al, has published a study on applying functional analysis for a child with autism spectrum disorders. In this study the functional analysis was conducted in two different settings; the playground and the classroom.

The results showed different controlling variables for the to conditions, and therefor requiring two different interventions. This is of course know to all behavior analysts that this often is the case, but this publications is a usefull reminder to conduct the needed assessment in the different settings before designing interventions.

Lang, R., O´Reilly, M., Lancioni, G., Rispli, M., Machalicek, W., Chan, J.M, Langthorne, P., & Franco, J. (2009) Discrepancy in Functional Analysis Results Across Two Settings: Implications for Intervention Design. Journal of Applied Behavir Analysis, 42, 393-397.