Developing an Educational Program for Children with Autism

1. Developing an Educational Program for Children with Autism Mark L. Sundberg, Ph.D., BCBA www.marksundberg.com

2. Elements of an Educational Program for Children with Autism • Assessment of a child’s needs • Identification of an individualized program (IEP) • Constructing an individualized curriculum • Developing an intervention program • Measuring progress (Data collection) • On-going analysis and adjustment

3. Elements of an Educational Program for Children with Autism • Classroom design/daily schedule • Creating a language and social skills educational environment • Behavior problems • Staff training • Parent training • Integration/inclusion

4. Assessment of an Individual Child’s Needs • What exactly is it that a child with autism needs to learn, and in what order? • The need for a conceptual framework to guide assessment (and intervention) • Lots of choices, confusing, too many, no research, lots of money, (currently on the internet, there are 406 different treatments for autism, Romanczyk, 2007) • Behavior Analysis (Behavioral Psychology) provides an evidenced-based foundation for understanding the issues affecting children with autism, and for guiding intervention programs

5. Four Powerful Tools for Children with Autism • 1) The basic teaching procedures that form the foundation of Applied Behavior Analysis (or “Behavior Modification,” DTT, ITT, etc.) • 2) The functional analysis of behavior (A-B-C), or “behavior analysis” • 3) Skinner’s functional analysis of verbal behavior (e.g., mands, tacts, intraverbals) • 4) Sign language (and to a lesser degree PECS)

6. Assessment of an Individual Child’s Needs • Our first task is to identify the existing skills of each child in the classroom • Our next task is to identify the language, social, behavioral, and learning barriers that are preventing more rapid learning • The failure to conduct an appropriate assessment results in one of the biggest problems in programs that serve children with autism: An inappropriate curriculum • We need a tool that is easy to use and will provide teachers, parents, and staff with the necessary information to develop an appropriate intervention program

7. The Importance of Language and Social Behavior • The primary focus of an intervention program for children with autism should be on the development of effective language and social skills • There clearly are several other areas, such as play skills, visual motor skills, fine and gross motor, etc., but language and social skills are typically the most significant deficits for children with autism, and careful training is the key to the most significant gains

8. What is Language? • How do we talk about it? • How do we measure it? • What are its parts? • How do we assess it? • How do we teach it? • What theory of language should we use for children with autism?

9. A Behavioral Approachto Autism Treatment • Behavioral psychology has a lot to offer those who work with children with autism • Basic teaching procedures and methodology derived from Applied Behavior Analysis (B-mod, ABA, DTT) • These procedures and methods have a solid research foundation that can be easily found in over 1500 empirical studies that have been conducted over the past 60 years

10. Behavioral Procedures • Reinforcement • Prompting • Fading • Modeling • Shaping • Chaining • Pairing • Differential reinforcement procedures (e.g., DRO, DRI, DRL) • Intermittent reinforcement procedures (e.g., FR, VR, FI, VI)

11. Behavioral Procedures • Extinction procedures (e.g., planned ignoring) • Punishment procedures (e.g., reprimands, time out) • Generalization and maintenance • Discrimination training • Errorless learning • Transfer of stimulus control • Task analysis • Fluency procedures • Contingency contracting • Token economies

12. Additional Behavioral Procedures and Methods • Individualized assessment and intervention program • Frequent opportunities to respond • Use of discrete trial teaching procedures • Incidental & natural environment teaching procedures • Data collection • Interspersal techniques • Behavioral momentum techniques • Independent and peer play training • Social interaction training • Parent and staff training in behavior analysis • Functional analyses of problem behavior (Iwata, et al. 1982)

13. Shaping • The differential reinforcement of successive approximations to a target behavior • Task analysis (small steps) • Changing criteria

14. The Value of Behavior Analysisfor Children With Autism • What else does behavioral psychology have to offer? • In addition to the use of specific procedures (e.g., prompting, fading, and differential reinforcement), a second and critical contribution of behavioral psychology involves the “analysis” of the causes of behavior • For example, a functional analysis (antecedent-behavior-consequence) is a powerful tool for identifying the causes of problem behavior

15. Behavioral Psychology: The three-term contingency (An ABC analysis) AntecedentBehaviorConsequence “Come inside” runs away delay to coming in & being chased

16. The Value of Behavior Analysisfor Children With Autism • What else can a behavioral approach offer? • Skinner’s analysis of language found in the book Verbal Behavior (Skinner, 1957) • Language is learned behavior under the functional control of environmental variables (Skinner, 1957), just like a tantrum • The same behavioral principles pioneered by Skinner that provide the foundation of discrete trial training (DDT), applied behavior analysis (ABA), natural environment training (NET), pivotal response training (PRT), etc., also provide the foundation for Skinner’s analysis of language

17. The Behavioral Classificationof Language • Skinner (1957) calls this collection of language skills “The Elementary Verbal Operants” (e.g., mand, tact, echoic, intraverbal, textual) • The elementary verbal operants are separate repertoires and functionally independent at the time of acquisition, and each must be taught • Speaker and listener skills are separate repertoires and each must be taught • More complex language, such as conversations and language related to social skills, is comprised of these basic elements

18. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP • Based on Skinner’s (1957) analysis of verbal behavior • Based on typical language development milestones • By identifying milestones, as opposed to a task analysis of individual skills, the focus can be sharper, and the direction clearer • Field test data from approximately 75 typically developing children • Field test data from over 150 children with autism • Based on the body of empirical research that provides the foundation of Behavior Analysis • Based on the empirical research on Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior

19. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program:The VB-MAPP • There are four components of the VB-MAPP • The VB-MAPP: Skills Assessment contains 165 verbal behavior milestones across 3 developmental levels (0-18 mos., 18-30 mos., 30-48 mos.) and 16 different verbal operants and related skills • The VB-MAPP: Skills Task Analysis provides a further breakdown of the different skill areas in the form of a checklist for skills tracking • The VB MAPP: Barriers Assessment examines 22 common learning and language barriers faced by children with autism • The VB-MAPP: IEP Goals provides over 200 IEP objectives directly linked to the skills and barriers assessments, and verbal behavior intervention program (Sundberg, in preparation)

20. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessmentand Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Skills Assessment • The assessment is designed to identify the child’s existing language and related skills • An assessment should probe a representative sample of a repertoire • Typical verbal milestones can provide the frame for the sample • Typical verbal milestones can help to avoid focusing on only minor steps • Typical verbal milestones can help to avoid targeting skills for intervention that are developmentally inappropriate • IEP goals can match the milestones, not individual skills

21. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessmentand Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Skills Assessment • The 16 skills assessed on the VB-MAPP include: • The elementary verbal operants (e.g., echoic, imitation, mand, tact, intraverbal) • The listener skills • Vocal output • Play and social skills • Visual perceptual skills, and matching-to-sample • Grammatical and syntactical skills • Group and classroom skills • Beginning academic skills

22. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessmentand Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Skills Assessment • The milestones are broken into three developmental levels (see Skills Form) • Level 1: 0-18 months • Level 2: 18-30 months • Level 3: 30-48 months • The scores for each skill are approximately balanced across each level • There are 5 items and 5 possible points for each skill area (e.g., level 1, tact) • There are three boxes in all sections for three separate administrations (See Tact Assessment Form Sample) • Each of the 165 items is scored 0, 1, or 1/2 based on the criteria in the VB-MAPP instruction manual • Looking for the operant level; If the skill is below the operant level score quickly and move on, if it is close to the operant level, test it

24. VB-MAPP Level 1: Tact

25. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Skills Assessment • The total for the five items is marked on the top of each skill area • The totals for each skill area are added for all three levels and placed on the VB-MAPP Scoring Form • There are three sub-tests: • Echoic • Listener Responding by Function, Feature, and Class (LRFFC) • Intraverbal • The total score on the sub-test is converted to a milestone score on the VB- MAPP forms • The items on these sub-tests, as well as the VB-MAPP in general, have been adjusted many times based on the field-test data (See VB-MAPP Assessment Forms) • VB-MAPP samples

26. VB-MAPPS for Typically Developing Children Lisa Hale Mark L. Sundberg Rikki Roden Carl T. Sundberg Cindy A. Sundberg

32. VB-MAPPs for Children with Autism Mark L. Sundberg Carl T. Sundberg Shannon Rosenhan Shannon Montano Kaisa Weathers

49. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: Skills Task Analysis • The milestones can be considered floors in a building, and the task analysis contains the steps between each floor • There are 165 milestones and approximately 600 total tasks in the VB-MAPP task analysis • The task analysis form also allows for more detailed skills tracking