Behavior Intevention
Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is an effective, evidence-based intervention tailored to the child’s needs and is based on a thorough analysis of the child’s current level of performance on specific skills. ABA interventionists work closely with caregivers and examine parts of the environment that affect the child’s skill performance. Interventionists then change the environment in ways that help improve your child’s skills. Once the interventionists and caregiver identify a skill to teach, the interventionists:
  • Break down the skill into specific teachable steps
  • Present multiple opportunities for the child to practice the skill
  • Use strategies such as prompting, shaping, chaining, reinforcement, and error correction to increase your child’s performance
For example, to teach your child to get dressed independently, your child’s interventionists might break up dressing into smaller steps (e.g., putting on underwear, then pants, then shirt etc.; or even break up the task of putting on a shirt into steps of laying out the shirt, putting each arm in, raising the shirt overhead, etc.) and even modify the task initially to make it easier (e.g., using sweatpants at first rather than stiffer jeans that require buttoning and zippering). The interventionists might use prompts such as hand over hand assistance, lots of praise for each correctly completed step, and error correction (e.g., interrupting an incorrect response and providing assistance to complete the step correctly). Sometimes children do not yet know how to do something like getting dressed and sometimes they also engage in problem behavior that impacts their skills. If problem behavior is an issue, interventionists will:
  • Examine the environmental variables that maintain the problem behavior
  • Use strategies to decrease the problem behavior while still teaching the target skill
For example, if a child throws a tantrum when asked to get dressed because he/she needs help but does not have the skill to ask for assistance, the interventionists would teach the child to ask for assistance instead of having a tantrum. Meanwhile the interventionists would continue to teach the child to get dressed until he/she dresses independently without throwing a tantrum.
ABA interventionists also work with caregivers to share and teach the strategies that are effective in improving their children’s skills and decreasing problem behavior.