What is ABA?
"Applied" means practice; "behavior analysis" may be read as "learning theory," that is, understanding what leads to (or doesn't lead to) new skills. For many children on the autism spectrum, the behavioral excesses and deficits result largely from a learning 'difference', which can be overcome by teaching.
Typically developing children learn without our intervention--the world around them provides the right conditions to learn language, play, and social skills. Children with autism learn much, much less easily from the environment. They have the potential to learn, but it takes a very structured environment, one where conditions are optimized for acquiring the same skills that typical children learn "naturally". ABA is all about how to set up the environment to enable our kids to learn.
Behavior analysis dates back at least to Skinner, who performed animal experiments showing that food rewards lead to behavior changes (learning). This is accepted by everyone who wants to train their dog to 'go' outside, though we are not so inclined to believe the same of ourselves. People, fortunately, respond to a broad range of reinforcements (rewards); an ABA teacher may use "edibles" at first, and then move on to a much wider range of "reinforcers". The skills that we more often think lead to learning--motivation, self-discipline, curiosity--are marvelous and essential to our development--but those are truly sophisticated "behaviors" that bloom only after more basic language and social skills are in place.
Conversely, any new behavior that an animal (or you or I) may try, but is never rewarded, is likely to die out after a while (How often will you dial that busy number? How often will you dial the same number when it has been 'disconnected'?). And, as common sense would have it, a behavior that results in something unpleasant (an aversive) is even less likely to be repeated. These are the basics of behavioral learning theory. ABA uses these principles to set up an environment in which our kids learn as much as they can as quickly as possible, with a constant emphasis on the use of positive rewards. It is a science, not a 'philosophy.' Even the "as quickly as possible" part is based on science, since there is some--not conclusive--evidence that the developmentally disordered brain "learns how to learn" best if the basic skills are taught in early childhood.
Applied Behavior Analysis, when put into practice, has proven to be effective at teaching children new things. We use it every day, not only to teach new things, but to teach children with autism HOW to learn new things. ABA changed the way professionals viewed children with autism. Once thought to be uneducable and doomed to a life with little or no advancement, children with autism learned, changed, even “recovered” when Applied Behavior Analysis was used intensively. We have seen Applied Behavior Analysis bring children back to their families, bonding with them, showing them love and attention, and talking together. The science isn’t perfect but because it is a science it is open to scrutiny and change. That is a benefit to every life it touches because it is open to change through further research that helped create it… not popularity, catch phrases, or whims. We believe every child can benefit and make significant gains when Applied Behavior Analysis is applied in intensive treatment. For us, only ABA has enough peer reviewed research focusing on children with autism and other PDD’s for us to want to use it, teach people about it, and use it for children that we care about.
Click on the ABA Toolbox to learn details about some of the tools we use in changing behavior.
