Association for Behavior Analysis International

Behavioral and traditional approaches to treating children with autism are very different in terms of philosophies, goals, curriculums, and specific teaching methods. Each of the presenters will provide a brief overview of these differences and discuss a study that they are implementing together in order to compare the effectiveness of the two approaches. The participants in this study are children ages 2-5 years that have a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The children were videotaped in a standard situation with the same teacher and typically developing peer. Once the children had been video taped in the three situations, trained observers used the Autism Behavioral Observation System (ABOS) to measure the percentage of intervals in which specific target behaviors occurred. Inter-observer reliability and validity were measured for the ABOS. As the children were being video taped, their parents were interviewed in order to obtain detailed diagnostic information, as well as to determine which type of treatment approach had been chosen by the parents. Nine months later, parents will be interviewed again and the children will be videotaped in the same standard situations. Comparisons will be made between the children who are matched according to age, gender and initial level of autism to ascertain their progress in various areas of development. The researchers also investigated family characteristics that effected parents selection of a behavioral vs. traditional approaches to treatment of their children with autism. Finally, there are examples of using ABA approaches for children with ASD within the public school regular classes.