Why Analysis Applied Behavioral (ABA) works on young children (163.5 kB)

Vince La Marca, certified behavior analyst and editor at the Lovaas Institute-Indianapolis

I lost count of the times that I have worked with children who showed inconsistency in the use of a skill and then acquire it after the start of behavioral therapy. One of the girls that I had taught at the age of 5 years, a reduced vocabulary. The progress had been minimal in all verbal skills because he was unable to repeat the words consistently. I worked with a girl of 4 years at school could not thread the beads, and a 3 year old child who used to formulate approximate only 3 sounds not usually repeated requests and more.

Two weeks after the onset of behavioral therapy, the 3 year old child could ask a number of things making sounds four times approximate. The mother has made ​​a list of more than 15 words which he repeated during therapy. Three days after the onset of behavioral therapy, the girl of 5 years regular repeating the words, and his mother was able to hear while learning to say "mama". After 15 minutes the mother has used some therapeutic techniques to teach the 4 year old daughter to put the beads, which it had not been able to do in the months prior to the work of teaching others.

These are episodes, and I'm not going to present them as evidence of the effectiveness of behavioral therapy. Instead, I use it to ask a question, "why this sudden change in some children after initiation of therapy?". Based on my observations of other forms of teaching, I think the answers are more than obvious.

1) Behavior therapy provides positive results and stimulates the child to respond properly and immediately. A child does not know what a boat? This will indicate, or guide his hand on it, or will draw it to him along the table.

2) Behavior therapy reinforces (rewards) the positive results. Forgive the lack of technical terms, but the gist is that when a child learns something, we want to know you have learned. If the child is for the first time the boat will take him alone in his arms, tell him that was good and it will run like a top.

3) Behavior therapy is achieving its objectives quickly, but gradually. When a child responds correctly to a given prompt, we will begin to decline and change the prompt so that the child does not become dependent. When a child begins to imitate movement approximated (easier to stimulate), we will begin to teach more precise movements (more difficult to stimulate) and finally the mouth movements. And when a child is able to imitate actions like opening your mouth and bite the bullet, you can introduce sounds like "aaaaa" or "eee".

Through these phases, what first seemed almost impossible - to repeat sounds in a child, seeing him engaged in pretend play or a conversation - it becomes another step on the path to a more complex behavior.

I'd like to know what are, in others, elements of behavior analysis that make it so effective for many children.

Original document taken from the blog of ' Lovaas Institute Translation by This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it >George Antonioli