Sometimes one may hear statements like “he is to high functioning for ABA intervention”. For all involved in behavior analysis this statement don´t make sense, but for a lot of others it seems to do. Therefor it is need for many studies and demonstrations shown how behavior interventions are effective in teaching for all children and maybe specially for persons wit high-functioning autism.
Palmen, Didden and Lang have now published a review of behavioral intervention studies aimed at improving adaptive skills in high-functioning young adults (above 16) with autism spectrum disorders. Their review indicates that there are some evidence that behavioral interventions may improve adaptive skills for young adults with high-functioning ASD. But there is still need for more research, especially involving true experimental designs.
Procedures producing untrained responses, or emergent responses has been known within stimulus equivalence, naming, relational frame theory etc. And there have been published several demonstration of such procedures for children with autism. Most recently Ingvarsson, Cammilleri and Macias have published a study demonstrating emergent listener responses following intraverbal training.
In this study they demonstrated that a new relation between verbal stimuli and non-verbal stimuli was established through intraverbal training.
Generalization, over selectivity and discrimination often poses a challenge in intervention for children and adults with autism spectrum disorders. And often special considerations and programming is needed in order to assist children with autism to generalize skills established through teaching, not being impeded by overselectivty and to effectively discriminate stimuli in the environment.
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As stated in several posts there are extensive research support for the implementation of Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention (EIBI) for young children with autism. But there are still need for more research and knowledge. One of the most interesting areas to gain more knowledge is the effectiveness of implementing EIBI at a large-scale and into regular communities and services.
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In the recent years there have been published several meta-analyses showing the effectiveness of early intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI). But according to Kuppens and Onghena (2012) the use of sequential meta-analysis (SMA) will provide a statistical framework to determine the sufficiency of cumulative knowledge in a meta-analysis. In their approach to a conduct a SMA they recommend a four-step procedure; (1) compute optimal information size, (2) perform a cumulative meta-analysis in a chronological sequence, (3) construct sequential boundaries, and (4) determine sufficiency.
When applying SMA to meta-analyses of EIBI, Kuppens and Onghena conclude that “sufficient cumulative knowledge was attained to draw convincing statistical conclusions favouring at least a medium treatment benefit for intellectual, language, and adaptive behavior outcomes in terms of group comparison effectiveness. Hence, we can be fairly confident to conclude that overall EIBI programs are more effective than the active or non-active treatment program they were compared against.”
This article is published in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Today I joined a listserv on interteaching. “An inter teach is a mutually probing, mutually informing conversation between to people.” (Boyce & Hineline, 2002). An inter teach deals with the main points in a specified selection of material, based on a preparation guide. For an excellent and detailed description of interteaching, I recommend the Bouce & Hineline article “Interteaching:A StrategyforEnhancingthe User-Friendliness of Behavioral Arrangements in the College Classroom” published in The behavior Analyst 2002. The listserv is newly started and already active, and i really recommend attending it if you are interested in behavior analysis and teaching.
Link to the listserv.
Effective prompting is an essential factor in Early Intensive Behavior Interventions (EIBI), and choice of prompting tactics requires good knowledge on research on prompting tactics, individual factors of the child, and other elements in the environment. Adding to the research-base of prompting, Ingarsson and Hollobaugh has publish a study comparing the efficacy of tact-to-intraverbal and echoic-to-intraverbal transfer of stimulus control procedures in 3 children with autism.
This study, published in Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, shows that both procedures (picture prompts and verbal prompts) were effective, but that picture prompts (tact-to-intraverbal) resulted in fewer trials.
Discrete trial teaching or training (DTT) is a commonly used and effective behavior analytic teaching strategy. DTT has successfully been applied to a variety of populations, including autism, mental retardation, language delay etc. In order to be an effective teaching strategy DTT has to be implemented with high treatment integrity.
Most studies on treatment integrity has examined integrity by errors of omission, which is when professionals don´t implement components of a treatment protocol. Recent discussions has expanded treatment integrity to include errors of commission, which is when professionals implement a procedure that are not prescribed by the treatment protocol. In a recent article Read more…
