Why Applied Behaviour Analysis / Intensive Behavioural Intervention?

Developed by Psychologist B.F. Skinner. (1904-1990)

He was the founder of "programmed instruction" and The Analysis of Behaviour which is used today to successfully treat many children with autism. He is also wrote the book on Verbal behaviour, another technique that is widely used today in the autism population to teach language skills.

Skinner believed that there were five obstacles to learning. These are having fear of failure, a lack of direction, a lack of clarity in the direction, not enough positive reinforcement and a task not being broken down into small enough steps for teaching.

Dr. Lovaas tested children using an intensive form of ABA at UCLA which involved two years of intensive treatment. He published his study in 1987 at the University of California in Los Angeles. The treatment he used is called Intensive Behavioural Intervention, which is a form of Applied Behaviour Analysis, utilizing a defined Discrete Trial Training (ABA-DTT) format. This took place 40 hours a week with 19 children with ASD. The children ranged from 2.11 years to 3.5 years of age. 40% of these children made such gains that they were indistinguishable from typical children and the other group had significant improvement (a few made no improvements).

IBI uses discrete trial training which is when a task is broken down into a series of smaller steps. Each step is taught by using the following concepts:

1. Antecedent stimulus (cue or instruction)
2. The child's response
3. A consequence delivered immediately after

This is the same as the ABC's of Applied Behaviour Analysis which is antecedent, Behaviour, Consequence.

We use a most to least model (also known as the errorless approach) because research has shown that least to most prompting produces more errors and children have a higher rate of becoming prompt dependent.

It is very important to collect data in ABA/IBI. We start with a baseline to see where the child is at before we teach a new skill. This way we can measure their progress accurately and make appropriate changes to the program.

At LMSA we only use positive reinforcements (no aversives), and we follow a probe data model. If the child is slow in improving skills, a discrete trial data may be implemented and revisions to programming will be made.