Autism Education - Applied Behavior Analysis Makes Use Of Reinforcement and Facilitate Learning

(prHWY.com) September 2, 2012 - Usa, FL -- Alpharetta, Georgia Sep 02, 2012 - The ABA training itself is not going to actually be applied to the student, but will instead give the teacher the tools that they need in order to identify some of the reasoning for a student's behaviors and to then formulate a teaching strategy that can help to alter any negative behaviors. A good example of ABA training at work would include a student with a tendency towards anti-social behaviors and the parents and teachers who used their ABA training to develop a treatment plan.

Autism Education - Applied Behavior Analysis is an incredible teaching program that allows parents or therapists to observe children and record every aspect of a certain behavior. The concept or behavior being taught is broken down into basic steps, which are taught using prompts and reinforcement to be effective. A child will be prompted to provide a certain answer or to exhibit a certain behavior, and the prompts will be given until the behavior is mimicked. As the child better learns to perform the behavior, the prompts will be slowly taken away until it can be done without them.

While many children are able to learn from being scolded or corrected, for autistic children there is little differentiating between negative and positive attention. This means that instead they must be rewarded with attention only when the correct behavior or outcome is received. Instead of scolding or punishing for inappropriate behaviors, they are simply ignored and not met with attention.

Autism For Teachers - ABA therapy is truly remarkable, and it is one of the only treatments for autism that most insurance companies will pay for. There is ample evidence to show the short and long term success of ABA therapy, and many children who receive intensive training at a very early age are able to display almost complete symptom reduction. There is still no cure for autism, and ABA therapy is not intended to cure the disease, but it can certainly help to reduce symptoms and enable many children to lead productive lives alongside their peers, which can certainly be a welcome change from the fears that many parents of these children deal with every day.
The parents and teachers who had received the training would have learned how to observe that child for any indicators of the reasons for the behavior. They would then apply their learning to create a plan for positive reinforcement of the behaviors desired, and a precise teaching strategy to begin training that child to learn how to behave in a more productive and meaningful way.

About the Author:

Autism Education - Maximum Potential had developed a video based training program that enables school systems, parents and therapists with the ability to learn the skills necessary to provide ABA Therapy to their students and children. Our program was developed by two PhD BCBA's with over 25 years combined experience in both private and school settings.

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