Autism and Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA): It's More Than You Think!
Reprinted with permission of
Utah Special Educator, February 2008
Thomas S. Higbee, Associate Professor, Department of Special Education and Rehabilitation; Director, ASSERT Autism Program, Utah State University
pages 16-19
For many special educators who work with students with autism spectrum disorders
(ASD) and related disabilities, the initials "ABA" immediately conjure up images of a teacher and a student seated across a table from one another in highly structured and rapidly paced one-on-one instruction. Others images brought to mind might include teachers giving precision commands such as "look at me" or "get ready" while physically prompting students to comply. While these techniques are, or have in the past been, important components of the "ABA" approach to teaching students with ASD, they no longer define the approach. In fact, the science of Applied behavior Analysis (ABA) provides a much broader range of techniques for addressing the academic, social, communicative, and behavioral challenges of students with ASD.
Discrete Trial Teaching (DTT) is the structured teaching method that many educators think about when they hear "ABA." DTT is a much-researched approach that has been shown to be highly effective in teaching many skills to students with ASD (see Remington et al. 2007 as a recent example of the positive outcomes produced by DTT). The basic logic of DTT involves presenting students with repeated opportunities to practice specific skills and receive feedback and reinforcement from an instructor based on their performance. These opportunities to practice skills and receive feedback and reinforcement are called "discrete trials."
The basic structure of each discrete trial is as follows: 1) the teacher obtains student's attention, 2) the teacher presents an instruction, 3) the teacher waits for the student to respond to the direction and provides additional assistance in the form of prompts if necessary, and 4) the teacher provides a consequence based on how the student responds (reinforcement for correct responses, corrective feedback for incorrect responses).
DTT has been and continues to be an important component of modern comprehensive ABA programs for students with ASD. It is a very effective and efficient teaching strategy for teaching a variety of skills. DTT is not, however, well suited for teaching certain kinds of social and communication skills, such as social initiations, spontaneous language, and other critical social and play behaviors that are often missing in students with ASD. Thankfully, behavior analytic researchers have developed other teaching techniques designed specifically to address these social and communication deficits.
One of these techniques, social scripting/script fading, has been shown to be effective at increasing both social initiations and other spontaneous language in students with ASD. Social scripting involves creating "scripts" of appropriate language for students with ASD to use in specific social situations. In a recent study completed at the ASSERT program, we created three play-related scripts for students to use while engaging in cooperative play with their mothers (Reagon & Higbee, in press). For example, for a toy set that included cars and ramps to drive them on, we created scripts such as "Beep! Beep! Here I come!" and "My car goes fast!" We programmed these phrases into small voice recorder devices that would say the phrase each time the child pushed the button.
sssWe then taught the child to push the button and repeat the phrase. Once the child reliably pushed the button and said the phrase, we began the script fading procedure by removing the last word of the script (e.g., when the child pushed the button it would say, "My car goes..."). Even with the last word removed, the children continued to repeat the entire script. Over the course of a few sessions, we continued to remove words from the script until the script was no longer present. In addition to recording whether or not the student used the scripted responses, we recorded other appropriate play-related speech and saw large increases compared to baseline conditions with the addition of the social scripting/script fading procedures. After learning the scripts (we taught three), students began to recombine the various scripts as well as integrate them with statements made by their mothers to produce new play-related speech. As a result of the social scripting/script fading intervention, the children also increased their play-related speech in the presence of other toy sets that had never been associated with scripts, demonstrating that the skills they had learned were generalizing to new situations.
We have also used social scripting/script fading techniques to teach students with ASD to make social initiations, such as asking another child to play a board game during free play time.
Another technique for teaching social, play, and other skills that comes from the ABA research literature is called video modeling.
In video modeling interventions, footage is created that depicts one or more individuals engaging effectively in a sequence of play, social, or other behaviors (the "video model"). The learner views the videotape/DVD and is then given the opportunity to imitate the behavioral sequence. Video modeling procedures have been used to teach learners with ASD and related disabilities a variety of skills including perspective taking (e.g,. Charlop-Christy & Daneshvar, 2003), language e.g., Charlop & Milstein, 1989), daily living skills (e.g., Charlop-Christy, Le & Freeman, 2000), play (e.g., Reagon, Higbee, & Endicott, 2006), and academic skills (Kinney, Vedora & Stromer, 2003). Researchers have shown that participants rapidly acquire the target skills and demonstrate skill maintenance over long periods of time (e.g. Charlop & Milstein, 1989).
Technological advances have made video modeling more accessible by decreasing the cost and level of expertise necessary for creating video models (e.g., Charlop-Christy et al., 2000). On the technology side, all that is now required is a digital video camera and a computer with a DVD burner and basic video editing software (often included in software packages shipped with new computers). Of course, sufficient time, patience, and motivation to learn how to use the camera and video editing software are also required.
ABA researchers have also developed techniques to promote independence in students with ASD. Photographic activity schedules are one such tool that has been developed to increase the independent play, academic, and leisure skills of students with autism. Photographic activity schedules are composed of a sequence of pictures that serve as cues for children with disabilities to independently complete complex chains of behaviors (McClannahan & Krantz, 1999). Initial schedules are often constructed by taking pictures of the activities to be included in the schedule and mounting teach on a separate page and placing them inside a three-ring binder. Students are taught to follow the schedules using physical prompts and graduated guidance to assist them to open the schedule, touch the picture of the activity, obtain the necessary materials, complete the activity, return the materials to their proper location, and return to the schedule to turn the page and start the process again until
the schedule is completed. No verbal prompts or instructions are provided as this can build dependence on the instructor instead of the schedule. As students learn to follow the schedules, they can become more compact and can even be composed of written words instead of pictures (like a "to do" list) when students acquire sight-word
reading skills.
Social interactions can also be built into activity schedules using social scripting/script fading and related techniques. In fact, we recently completed a study at ASSERT in which we taught pairs of students with ASD to follow a joint activity schedule that cued them to play a sequence of interactive games together (Betz, Higbee, & Reagon, in press). Students who exclusively engaged in noninteractive parallel play during baseline learned to follow the schedule together and take turns obtaining the materials.
Mand training is another ABA technique for teaching students to make appropriate requests. Mand training takes advantage of naturally occurring student motivation to request preferred items/activities (often edibles in early stages of training). The student is prompted to make an appropriate communicative response via vocal speech, sign, or picture exchange (depending on the communication level of the student) and then the requested item is provided following the student's response. Once the student reliably makes requests, the instructor can add an eye contact requirement in addition to the communicative response. Thus, in order to obtain the requested item, the student must provide eye contact while making the communicative response. Over time, prompts are faded until the student spontaneously requests preferred items in their presence and then later in their absence.
In summary, the science of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) provides teachers with a wide variety of tools for addressing the educational and behavioral needs of students with ASD. For more information about these and other ABA techniques, or to schedule a visit to the ASSERT program, visit the ASSERT website at: http://sped.usu.edu/ASSERT
References available upon request from the Utah Personnel Development Center.
