Some days ago I rediscovered the online Relational Frame Theory (RFT) online tutorial developed by Eric Fox, based on a tip on Twitter made by @behaviortank, worth following on Twitter. I have visited and used this tutorial previously, and I can really recommend the use of this great resource.
The tutorial give a easy to understand and interactive presentation of contextual psychology and the basic concepts of Relational Frame Theory. It´s probably the easiest and most enjoyable way to learn about RFT, and it´s free. The tutorial also gives some small examples of the application of the theory, but as this is not the scope of this application this has to be learned somewhere else. But as you by using this tutorial can get the understanding of the basic theory and concepts, it´s really useful and hopefully leads to more people applying these theory into practice.
Chan, Lang, Rispoli, O´Reilly, Sigafoos and Cole published in the recent issue of Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders (3 – 2009) an interesting systematic review of the use of peer-mediated interventions
for children with autism spectrum disorders.
They included in their review studies using peers trained to implement interventions for children with autism. They excluded studies where peers did not require any training to interact with the children with autism.
They identified 42 studies which included 172 participants with autism spectrum disorders, and 396 trained peers.The 42 studies consisted of different components implemented by peers, as initiating interaction, maintaining interaction, prompting, providing contingent reinforcement and academic instruction. And the strategies to train peers were also different, examples including verbal explanation, discussion, modeling, role play, on-going feedback, manuals, video instructions etc.
Outcome in the studies included in this review was mainly positive, suggesting that peer mediated interventions may be an effective intervention approach for individuals with ASD.
Sometimes children with autism are reluctant to respond to discriminative stimuli or task during discrete trail teaching. This is of course a problem that can be due to a number of reasons. All from not having potential reinforcers to the tasks been too complex or difficult. This often easy to correct in the environment the children are receiving training. But for some children the problems seems to be that concurrent and competing schedules of reinforcement, as best described in Catania
, is the challenge the behavior analyst has to deal with.
Some children has a history of reinforcement with not responding, and this schedule compete with stimuli serving as reinforcers in other settings, or was selected during preference assessment. This of course can´t be said to be a reinforcer during DTT, but as for some of the children none seems to be. This poses a great challenge for the therapists or teachers. First of all it´s often difficult to assess in a natural environment. To assess this challenge to an extent that can lead to effective intervention on often has to perform a functional analysis in a controlled environment; something many therapist and children do not have access to.
The results of the functional analysis may also bee difficult to interpret and translate into effective practices. And when one succeed in developing effective intervention this often requires extreme knowledge of behavior analysis and trainer skills. My experience is therefore that this problem often are solved by implementing prompting procedures that serve as an aversive stimuli, and the child learn the skills under negative reinforcement. This will of course often establish the skills, but also increase other avoidance behavior, often make the child passive and create several ethical concerns.
So a task for practitioners and researchers should be to investigate time-efficient and simple enough procedures to assess those cases of concurrent and competing schedules of reinforcement for non-responding and responding in Discrete Trail Teaching
Granspeesheh and colleagues has investigated the effect of age and treatment intensity on the rate of learning within an early intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) program fro children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Their study includet 245 children, a greater number than several other studies in the intervention research for children with ASD.
This study indicates several important aspects of the influence of age en treatment intensity; the data indicates that the youngest children showed the greatest effect at low levels of intensity – similar gains as the middle aged group at high levels of intensity. And in the oldest group the data did not show a relationship between the number of objectives mastered and treatment intensity.
The date did not indicate a point of diminishing-returns – a point where more hours do not have more effect.
Vedora, Meunier and Mackay have in the recent issue of The Analysis of Verbal Behavior published a study where they compare the widely used echoic prompts in teaching verbal behavior with the use of textual prompts.
They found that textual prompts where more effective with their small sample, this result being interesting from a clinical perspective, prompting again for more variation and data analysis in selecting prompting techniques.