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About Intensive Behavioral Treatment Philosophy and Adaptation of the Treatment Model Age & Treatment Intensity - Treatment Process - Curriculum - Treatment Team Stages of Therapy - Evaluation - What Makes a Good Program? Job Descriptions - Our Directors
HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS & RESEARCH Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) with autistic children has experienced a return to popularity over the past six years. This renewed interest, in large part, can be linked to the publication of Catherine Maurice's book, Let Me Hear Your Voice, in which she chronicles the treatment of her two autistic children. Like many professionals and parents, Ms. Maurice initially had a dim view of behavioral intervention. She believed it to be an extremely negative and inflexible procedure. Moreover, she thought that behavioral intervention had limited effectiveness and often produced overtly mechanical responding in children. Her experience, however, proved to be far different. She found that behavioral intervention can be employed positively with a high degree of flexibility. Most importantly, the intervention proved to be highly effective. Ms. Maurice's story gave hope to parents who had been led to believe, often by professionals, that autistic children will always remain severely impacted by their diagnosis. With hope and a direction, parents throughout the world started setting up intensive behavioral programs. Parents also started demanding that schools and state agencies use ABA with their children. Although the tremendous popularity of ABA is recent, ABA is not a new procedure. Critics of behavioral intervention often contend that it is an "experimental" procedure with limited empirical evidence of its effectiveness. Lovaas (1987) and McEachin, Smith and Lovaas (1993) are often cited as the only two investigations to show that behavioral intervention with autistic children is effective. In fact, ABA is based upon more than 50 years of scientific investigation with individuals affected by a wide range of behavioral and developmental disorders. Since the early 1960's, extensive research has proven the effectiveness of behavioral intervention with autistic children. The research has shown ABA to be effective in reducing disruptive behaviors typically observed in autistic individuals, such as self-injury, tantrums, non-compliance and self-stimulation. ABA has also been shown to be effective in teaching commonly deficient skills such as complex communication, social, play and self-help skills. As early as 1973, Lovaas and his colleagues published a comprehensive study showing ABA to be effective in treating multiple behaviors with multiple children. Although the work by Lovaas is the most frequently cited, there is other evidence that ABA can result in substantial benefit. Harris and Handleman (1994) reviewed several research studies that showed that more than 50% of autistic children who participated in comprehensive preschool programs using ABA were successfully integrated into non-handicapped classrooms, with many requiring little on-going treatment.
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