Teaching Children with Autism: An Aba Primer

A related and perhaps as serious a problem is the narrowness of vision that most practitioners bring to the enterprise. ABA has been defined as the process of systematically applying interventions based upon the principles of learning theory to improve socially significant behaviors to a meaningful degree, and to demonstrate that the interventions employed are responsible for the improvement in behavior (Baer, Wolf, and Risley, 1968). Being based on the past hundred years of research into how learning works, ABA has universal applicationit can be applied to any developmental issue.

Unfortunately, while any concept can be defined in behavioral terms, you only have to ask yourself, What will I use as an indicator of _______? It tends to get applied primarily to those developmental issues that are easiest to define in behavioral terms. On the other hand, most nonABA approaches have relatively little scientific support.

This brief introduction to teaching children with autism is intended to serve as a primer for both instructor-therapists and parents alike. Hopefully, it will also move the field beyond the narrow focus that it has enjoyed for the past few decades.