Nesrhtens…..

As I am in Chicago for the ABAI Autism conference, I was lucky to be able to make a visit to the Chicago Educational Project (CEP). CEP is a non-public special education facility, using ABA and VB as the foundation for their teaching.

It was a really interesting visit, and I really liked the work they are doing. They made the point of designing individualized teaching based on the analysis of behavior, and had some really nice data-collection ideas.

It is always great to be able to visit and discuss the application of behavior analysis with other professionals, and as with CEP openly shared their ideas and practices, this will surely help in developing practices. I would really hope all doing ABA will be as open and welcoming as CEP. Thanks!

Be sure to check out their web-site: www.chicagoeducationproject.org!

Early an intensive behavior intervention (EIBI) is established as an effective treatment and educational option for young children with autism. As the intervention is based on analysis of behavior and environment it should also be effective for other children with or without disabilities. But there has been fewer research studies on this application of behavior interventions. But gladly, now Eldevik, Eikeseth, Hastings and Hughes has published a study on the outcome of behavior intervention for young children with intellectual disabilities.

This study compares behavior intervention to an eclectic educational option showing results in favor of behavior intervention. 64 % of the children in the behavioral group showed objective reliable change in IQ as 14 % in the eclectic group. And the behavior group also showed favourable outcome in adaptive behavior. The behavior group only received about 10 hours a week of behavior intervention!

Link to the abstract.  Cognitive and Adaptive Behavior Outcomes of Behavioral Intervention for Young Children With Intellectual Disability

Continuous data collection is a key feature of Early and Intensive Behavior Interventions for preschool children with autism. Collecting data on child progress and trainer skills. This collection is usually done by pen-and-paper systems, but as more powerful and user friendly electronic devices become available to more people the use of electronic devices will probably increase.

Tarbox and colleagues has published a study comparing the use of electronic data collection to traditional pen-and-paper data collection in discrete trail training, using the mTrail software. The authors points out several possible benefits of electronic data collection:

- electronic storage

- electronic analyzing

- easier to collect real time data

- easier to collect a wider variety of data

In their study they systematically compared three aspects of data collection; electronically vs pen-and-paper. Their study shows that participants used moor time collecting data electronically than with pen and paper, the accuracy in data collection was slightly better using pen-and-paper, but the time graphing data was shorter using electronically data collection.

This i somewhat surprising as one of the main reasons for using electronic devices to collect data is to do it faster, better and more accurate. But of course this study is limited by the number of participants (4), and one software (the mTrail). And the participants had significant more experience doing pen-and-paper data collection. But it is great to see that this aspect of EIBI is systematically investigated, and future studies on this area may show different results.

Script fading procedures are well known within the behavior analytic education and treatment for children with autism, and has proven to be effective in increasing initiatives and interaction for a range of children with autism. However, script fading has not been showed to be effective implemented by parents in the home environment.

But, in this issue of Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Reagon and Higbee from Utah State University showing effective application of script fading by parents. And by this contribute to expanding research based behavior analytic techniques parents can implement in their home environment.

And the best part of this study, as I see it, is that in this study the parents were taught to develop, implement, and systematically fade scripts; not just implementing a procedure developed by the experts. The focus on teaching those who conduct the daily teachings sessions are the one of the most important aspects of providing effective and qualitative good services and education for all children with autism. And all research exploring this aspect in some way are welcomed.

Skinner´s definition of verbal operants describes the functional independence of the different operants, and research has demonstrated this several times. And in the recent issue of Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Shillingsburg and colleagues published a new study on training Yes and No responding across verbal operants.

This study supports previous findings that responses did not generalize across operants without additional training. The yes and no responses generalized within the verbal operants, but additional training was required for establishing these topographies in within other operants. This study included similar antecedents across operants, which has been supposed to facilitate generalization, but the results of this study do not show this effect.

As stated earlier and in this article, an interesting and important area for research are procedures and techniques to facilitate generalization across verbal operants. This would probably be a great contribution to the behavior analytic teaching for children with autism and others with language delays.