Teaching and Tech Tinkerings of a Special Educator: 11 Autism Treatments That Really Work- Part I

Saturday, February 20, 2010

11 Autism Treatments That Really Work- Part I

The National Standards Report (2009) written by the National Autism Center, reviews studies on existing treatments for autism. The report categorizes treatments as “established,” “emerging,” or “unestablished.” The 11 established treatments are considered to be effective and beneficial to the individual with autism. The list below provides the name of each treatment, a brief description, and an example of how it may be implemented. I have listed the interventions alphabetically.

Antecedent Package
-changing events that occur before a target behavior would typically occur. The target behavior can be a behavior you want to see more or less of. Examples include incorporating obsessional interests into activities, prompting, and errorless learning.

Ellen is a seven-year-old first grader with Asperger’s Syndrome who frequently has tantrums when it is time for the class to begin a writing assignment. Given Ellen’s passion for locomatives, her teacher targets her behavior by encouraging Ellen to mark various locations she has visited via rail on a subway system map and bring in her photo collection of trains to serve as topics for her to write about.

Behavioral Package

-reducing challenging behaviors and introducing functional alternate behaviors (e.g. task analysis, token economy, discrete trial training, contingency contracting, chaining, shaping)

     Rashon, a nonverbal second grader with autism who enjoys music, hits himself in the head each time he ties his shoes incorrectly. The occupational therapist completes a task analysis in which she breaks down the skill of shoe-tying into its steps. She develops a plan for Rashon to experience the success of completing the shoe-typing task. That is, Rashon will learn to complete the last step in the shoe-tying process before he learns any other step. Through this process of backward chaining, the teacher will perform all of the steps leading up to the last step of tightening the two loops. Once Rashon has experienced success with this step, the teacher will complete the steps until the second to last step, and so forth until Rashon is able to successfully tie his shoes each time. At the same time, Rashon’s special education teacher suggests that they use a token economy system in which they give him a plastic token each time he completes the shoe-tying activity without self-injury. When he earns five tokens, he gets to choose from a variety of rewards which include musical activities.

Comprehensive Behavioral Treatment for Young Children
-treating children ages 0 through 9 with programs that have written instructions such as manuals, that specifically target the symptoms of autism spectrum disorder, and use a mixture of procedures from applied behavior analysis (e.g. incidental teaching, discrete trial training) Comprehensive behavioral treatments for young children include more than 25 hours per week of intensive intervention with a low student-to-teacher ratio. Of the eleven treatments, this one is the most difficult to explain as it combines many strategies from the ten other effective treatments listed in the report. Furthermore, the report does not list manuals that support this treatment.

     At the Sunshine Preschool, the speech language pathologist employs incidental teaching. She arranges the play area so that Jake’s favorite toys are out of his reach. He must communicate in order to obtain these toys. He is rewarded for requesting his favorite toy, the jack-in-the-box, when the teacher hands him the toy upon his request.
     Throughout the day, a classroom assistant, Mr. Garrison, works with Jake on a variety of skills through discrete trial training. For example, Jake learns to identify his classmates in photos. Mr. Garrison asks, “Who’s this?” as he shows the photo of a student. If Jake responds correctly, Mr. Garrison says, “Good job” and gives him a token toward earning a reward from his menu of reward choices. If Jakes answers incorrectly (was unresponsive, gave an approximate or partial answer, or was uncooperative), he gives a pre-determined response such as, “No. It’s Sarah” and does not provide a reward token. Mr. Garrison records the number of correct and incorrect responses. He uses the data to determine when Jake has mastered learning a student’s name and can move on, when different prompts are needed, and if rewards need to be changed.

The next few posts at Teaching and Tech Tinkerings of a Special Educator will address the remaining
8 established treatments. Teaching and Tech Tinkerings will soon include links to treatment resources.