Different Roads to Learning Methods: A Comprehensive Guide
Students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) present a unique challenge to educators due to the considerable heterogeneity within this population. This variability necessitates qualitatively and quantitatively different levels of educational and behavioral support for each individual. As a result, students with ASD are educated across a spectrum of placements, ranging from specialized programs to general education classrooms. An abundance of intervention strategies exist, some of which have not been empirically supported. A feature of many of the most utilized treatment approaches is their implementation in clinics or specialized settings, and apparent lack of applicability to less restrictive educational environments. This article aims to describe selected interventions and consider their compatibility with general education placement.
Interventions for Autism Spectrum Disorders
A wide variety of interventions exist for children with autism spectrum disorders and can be tailored to meet the needs of the individual student. Interventions can range from being highly structured and adult-driven to child-directed, or anywhere in-between. The listings below are intended to serve only as a brief example of a few of the more commonly known available interventions, including discrete trial teaching, pivotal response training, videotaped self-modeling, and Division TEACCH®. The list is not intended to be inclusive of all potential approaches.
Discrete Trial Teaching (DTT)
Discrete trial teaching (DTT) is an intervention method based on the principles of operant learning theory. Promoted by O. Ivar Lovaas from the University of California, Los Angeles, discrete trial teaching is used to teach a variety of skills in domains including cognitive, communication, play, social, and self-help skills. Today there are various interpretations of the use of discrete trial teaching. Discrete trial teaching is also referred to as Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA).
The basic principles of DTT include breaking a skill down to its component parts, allowing repeated practice, providing prompting and fading, and using reinforcement. Prompts are utilized and then faded out, and reinforcement procedures are used. DTT is appropriate to use with all ages and with diverse populations.
Families participating in a strict DTT/ABA program engage their child in 35-40 hours per week of intensive behavior intervention, based on operant techniques and the shaping of behavior through reinforcement of successive approximations, prompting and fading procedures, and the use of positive reinforcers that are functional. This highly structured one-to-one teaching approach focuses on maximizing success and minimizing failure, while using a variety of reinforcers to maintain motivation.
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While utilizing behavior techniques associated with the science of applied behavior analysis is rather common in classroom settings, employing the use of strict one-on-one discrete trial teaching style therapy may be more challenging and limiting. Initially, skills may need to be taught in a more specialized setting, but then skills must be introduced and taught within the context of the general education and other typical settings. For example, when a child learns to respond to simple social questions (“How are you?” or “What’s your name?”), the classroom assistant or teacher will then contrive situations in which the child must use these phrases with other adults or classmates.
Although a child may need pullout services for a short period during the day or after school for skill acquisition, applying these skills in natural settings is crucial for generalization. If the teacher is kept current with the child’s programming and understands the procedures associated with discrete trial teaching, trials can easily be integrated into curriculum.
Pivotal Response Training (PRT)
Another technique using discrete trial training is Pivotal Response Training (PRT). Whereas Lovaas incorporates a more specific and rigid method of discrete trial teaching, pivotal response training uses pivotal or motivational trials. Robert and Lynn Koegel and their colleagues at the Autism Research Center at the University of California at Santa Barbara found Lovaas-developed methods of discrete trial teaching “laborious,” and “behaviors often failed to be exhibited in other settings or in response to items that were not specifically taught”. Concerned about the lack ofgeneralizability of skills taught via discrete trial teaching and lack of motivation in children with autism spectrum disorders to learn new tasks, Koegel and Koegel and colleagues developed PRT.
Pivotal Response Training emphasizes key pivotal skills, asserting that students who learn pivotal skills will generalize them to other areas. Pivotal behaviors are those that are central to a wide range of functioning, including motivation, responsivity to multiple cues, child self-initiation, and self-management. Increased motivation, for example, may lead to a dramatic effect upon children’s learning. An increase in motivation may in turn significantly increase and improve speech in students with autism spectrum disorders.
In order to implement pivotal response training in the classroom setting, Koegel and Koegel and their colleagues recommend incorporating five variables into the existing school environment. These five variables include teaching interactions by promoting choice, varying tasks and interspersing maintenance tasks, reinforcing attempts, using natural reinforcers, and developing self-initiated learning interactions. These variables are designed to improve motivation in the classroom, including widespread benefits across a number of academic and social behaviors, and with concomitant decreases in disruptive behaviors.
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Child choice includes the use of child-chosen or child preferred materials in teaching tasks. Incorporating choice as a curricular intervention can decrease undesirable behavior in the classroom. Child choice can be incorporated into the majority of academic activities. This may consist of allowing children to select materials for a given subject, to choose the order of completing worksheets, or by allowing the child to choose his or her own seat. Additionally, parents may be encouraged to incorporate child choice into homework completion time. An increase in motivation to initiate and complete homework assignments can be accomplished by allowing children choice as to the order for completing tasks, the writing implements used, the location in the house in which the work is conducted, and other ideas.
The lack of motivation apparent in children with autism spectrum disorders may be the result of recurring failure at tasks. To reduce the number of failures in an instructional period, PRT involves randomly and frequently interspersing new tasks with previously mastered items. When introducing a new number to a child with an autism spectrum disorder, for example, it may prove helpful to include a review of some numbers the child knows well. Rather than starting with a review and finishing with the new item, mixing the novel and mastered items throughout the trial will likely guarantee at least some success.
Contrary to many behavior interventions, practitioners of PRT reinforce all attempts in which the child appears to be trying, even if the response is incorrect. This will increase the likelihood of future responding to tasks and improve the child’s learning during social and academic tasks. Reinforcing attempts may include using phrases like “good try”.
Some reinforcers are more beneficial to the child than others. Using naturally occurring, intrinsically reinforcing consequences rather than arbitrary reinforcers, for example, may increase motivation and rate of learning. A natural reinforcer is one that is directly related to the task at hand. If a child says, “I want a cookie,” receipt of the cookie is a direct, natural reinforcer. If the child were to request the cookie and, as a consequence of appropriately using language, received something else (e.g., verbal praise), he or she would not likely associate the consequence with his or her own responding. Receiving a cookie, however, is a clear result of the verbal request.
Children with autism spectrum disorders often avoid social and learning opportunities outside of their areas of intense interest, while typically developing children more often actively seek out such occasions. Children with autism spectrum disorders lack spontaneous initiations, especially question asking and other verbal initiations. When systematically taught to inquire about highly reinforcing child-choice items, children with autism spectrum disorders were able to generalize this skill.
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TEACCH®
Pivotal response training is not the only approach with an emphasis on increasing motivation in children with autism spectrum disorders. The Treatment and Education of Autistic Children and Related Communication Handicapped Children (TEACCH®), an approach centered on Structured Teaching, is based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. TEACCH® describes its approach as “a comprehensive educational program with an emphasis on developing both motivation and skills in a wide range of curriculum areas.” TEACCH® interventions target presumed strengths in students with autism spectrum disorders and focus on designing accommodations to address inherent difficulties. Community outings and integrated playgroups are used to foster generalization of learning to larger group settings.
The TEACCH® model is guided by seven principles. These include promoting adaptation by improving the individual’s skills and developing environmental adaptations; emphasizing parental collaboration; conducting formal and informal evaluations for developing an individualized education program; utilizing cognitive and behavior therapy as intervention strategies; enhancing skills and accepting deficits in both children and parents; using visual cues to compensate for auditory processing problems; and utilizing a holistic orientation with multi-disciplinary training.
Gary Mesibov, the Director of Division TEACCH®, and his colleagues offer several suggestions for using Structured Teaching in the classroom setting. Before teaching commences, structure is established in the instructional environment. Specific recommendations concern the physical organization of the classroom (physical lay-out, selecting work areas, and boundaries), creating schedules, developing individual work systems, implementing visual structure, and teaching students to follow routines. These suggestions are discussed in detail below, followed by a brief description of the Structured Teaching method.
Careful physical organization of the classroom enables the student with an autism spectrum disorder to better understand their environments and relationships between events. Work areas for students with autism spectrum disorders should be free from distractions. Facing students’ desks toward a blank wall may eliminate many distractions and help students to attend to the relevant dimensions of their work activities and instruction. The individual needs of the student should be considered when selecting a classroom environment. For the student who is learning to use the toilet independently, for example, it is ideal to place the child in a classroom near the restrooms. Students with autism spectrum disorders may benefit from a transitional area, where all of the activity schedules are placed. Students go to the transition area to learn what the next activity will be.
For many students with autism spectrum disorders, clearly outlined boundaries may be useful. This may include pieces of tape on the floor indicating proper chair placement at a work station, the use of partitions to separate desks, or designating the carpeted portion of the classroom as a free-time area. As students function more independently, the amount of physical structure in the environment is tapered.
Like physical organization, schedules assist individuals with autism spectrum disorders in understanding their environment. “Developing visually clear schedules for students that each understands at his or her own level of ability allows a teacher to communicate which discrete events will occur during the school day, when they can be expected to occur, and how they are related to one another (e.g., first work and then play)”. Visually clear schedules assist students with autism spectrum disorders with sequential memory and time organization, reinforce oral directions that may be difficult to understand, and compensate for attentional problems by providing visual reminders of upcoming activities.
Similar to a schedule, an individual work system provides each student with the specifics of what he or she should do while working independently. These systems provide the student with four pieces of information: what work to do; how much work to do; how they will know when they have finished; and what will happen when they are finished. An individual work system promotes the child’s ability to work independently. However, work systems should not be misinterpreted as curriculum.
Many children with autism spectrum disorders do well with visually presented tasks. Visual tasks are more concrete and easier for the student with autism spectrum disorders to understand, and students often rely on visual teaching methods. Additionally, students with autism spectrum disorders may be more likely to attend to instruction if it is visually interesting. For example, a student may be more successful with a sorting task if the stimuli to be sorted include objects with patterns or colors the student enjoys. Also, color-coding the students’ materials is often helpful.
Tools and Materials for Learning
The site provides parents and therapists with materials needed for individual programs. They offer many different methods to learning. Some of these methods include flashcards, books, timers, communication boards, targets for more advanced social skills, and more. Look for the link “starting a program” that allows parents and therapists to see what others commonly use when starting a program. This may include assessments of current skills the child has, as well as deficits that need to be targeted in individualized programs. The most common assessments used are the ABLLS®-R: Assessment of Basic Language & Learning Skills and the VB-MAPP: Verbal Behavior Milestone Assessment & Placement Program.
The language builder cards can be used for multiple programs such as visual performance, receptive skills, and labeling. The cards can be used to teach labels, functions, features, and class. Timers can be used for on-task behavior or during transitions. They provide a clear beginning and end to work and break phases. Tally counters provide an accurate count of questions answered, mands for the day, and to track behaviors. Puzzles are used for visual performance=, an important step for learning. The child correctly identifies the shape or piece, locates the correct spot, and then has to manipulate the piece to fit into the puzzle. Common objects kits are used for receptive and labeling skills. The child learns the names of the objects and generalizes to common objects found around the home. These tools are useful when first starting a program. Remember to consultant a-bcba or bcaba- trained on how to use these materials effectively. They will be able to help develop an aba program specifically designed for your child. The bcba or bcaba will be able to help with implementation and generalization of the skills.
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