We, Beverly and Susan, want to build a community where people can come to learn more about autism spectrum disorders (ASD) by sharing experiences, thoughts, ideas, and research. We are especially excited at creating a place where parents and teachers from the autism community can come together to talk about ways to use applied behavior analysis (ABA) as a part of everyday life. Whether you are using ABA for a child with autism at home, in the community, or at school – we would love to hear about your successes and challenges. Parents-you are the experts when it comes to your child and we would love to learn from your everyday experiences. Teachers-you are who parents entrust their children to everyday to provide a quality education-Autism In Action would love to hear your perspectives on using ABA in the school setting. Let’s open communication and bring those perspectives together so that we can all learn from one another. Bev and Susan
Monthly Archives: November 2011
Why Applied Behavior Analysis and Autism Spectrum Disorders?
Applied behavior analysis (ABA) can generally be described as “the science of behavior”. It is a part of our daily lives whether we recognize it or not. For example, we all do certain things because they result in things we like; just as we all try to avoid things that result in what we don’t like. These are just two of the ways the principles of ABA influence us all. But ABA has been around since the early 1960s- so why are we hearing about it so much now? Well for starters, we are in the middle of a world-wide autism epidemic and ABA has decades of research to demonstrate it is the most effective treatment approach for individuals on the autism spectrum! Sometimes parents and teachers think that ABA is a new treatment intended only for young children with autism or that it can only be done in a therapy setting. It isn’t new, it isn’t just a private therapy, and it is not just for people with autism- ABA has been used in schools, homes, and all types of other settings for many years with all kinds of learners. It has gained popularity for teaching individuals with ASD because it systematically breaks learning into specific behavior-environment connections. This helps people on the spectrum understand when and how to do things we want them to learn to do. Let us know if we can be of any help in clarifying and describing how ABA is the ideal fit for learners on the autism spectrum. Bev and Susan
The Dreaded “D” Word…DATA!
Collecting good data doesn’t need to be something we dread…not when we learn to make it simple and still get the information we need. Classroom teachers have A LOT going on…we get that because when we aren’t training; we work in schools every day. We’ve also lived with kids that have autism and have worked in many of their homes…and wow… parents have A LOT going on too! That’s why when we need to collect data, it has to be efficient or it just won’t reliably happen. Let’s say we want to get started on a toilet training program. Parents will need to communicate how it is going at home and teachers will need to communicate how it is going at school. It doesn’t really work to just kind of talk about our general impressions because we miss out on too much valuable information. Besides, our perception of “how things are going” isn’t always so accurate when you compare it to actual data. So, if for example, we wanted to share information about when the child is most likely to urinate we could just record times when accidents occur each day. By looking at that data for natural patterns- a more refined and realistic toilet training schedule can be set which saves everybody time! We’d love to hear about how you’ve made data easy to collect and how you’ve used it to make good decisions for kids with autism spectrum disorders. Bev and Susan