Can someone please tell me about Applied Behavior Analysis?

Question

My daughter is disabled and has been struggling in school for some time now. She is in second grade and just finished neuropsychology testing at a wonderful hospital in our area. They are recommending ABA, which although normally referenced to in cases of autism, is being recommended for her at this time. Does anyone know a little about this method? How do you introduce it into your home along with the school? Any advice?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

ABA consists of a nymber of techniques-including, but notlimited to

Discrete TrialTeaching (DTT) where skills are broken down and taught in individual small steps-using repitition and reinforecment for correct responses

Incidental Learning involves joining the child in her play and expanding on skills as well as setting up learning situations

Prompting stategies from full physical (hand over hand prompting to independent success)/errorless teaching

the use of picture schedules

behavioral plans to positively reinbforce appropriate behaviors/extinguish inappropriate

natural environement teaching

this is a good easy to understand book that explains ABA-It beleive it is free (may be a fee for out of state residenst)

http://www.njcosac.org/cosac2/0136998F-0...

http://www.njcosac.org/cosac2/publicatio...

this is a good book that expains ABA

ABA basically uses the ABC principal

A-antecedent (what happened before)

B Berhavior (what chidl did)

C consequence (what happened to child (reward)

in teaching body parts-

A= teacher says TOUCH HEAD

B-student touches her head

c-gets reinforcement (tickles, sticker, bubbles, food, etc.)

a-teacher says touch head

b-student touches belly-

c-no reinforcer given-

    teacher gives direction again-child prompted to comply

also works with more complicated concepts/behaviors

Answer 2

ABA means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So perhaps a simple question is not so simple.

ABA often in the world of autism is meant to mean discrete trial training (DTT) which is a method of teaching things in small increments using shaping and prompting along with reinforcement to teach new behaviors. If done correctly they use a lot of data to make decisions about your child's progress and make changes to programs constantly when a plateau is reached to continue the progress.

There are a lot of other applications of ABA that may or may not apply to your child. If your child is having behavioral difficulties a behavior analyst may conduct a functional assessment to determine why the child is having these difficulties and then design a behavior intervention plan that both modifies the environment as well as identify specific new skills your child needs to learn to replace the problem behavior.

There are many other applications of ABA. I have included below some websites with additional information. the first one Behavior.org probably has the best information related to your question. I also included the ABA organizational website as well as the website for the national certification board in case you want to check is someone is certified or to find someone who is certified to provide behavioral services in your area.