VCU Autism Center for Excellence Webcast

VCU

05.08.12

VCU Autism Center for Excellence Webcast

Services provided by: Caption First, Inc.

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> When you are at 7/11, you have to wait. There is a setting situation here. You then hear the loudspeaker advertising coffee, another thing that happens before your behavior of buying coffee. You go into the store, buy a cup of coffee and it's warm, it picks you up, it makes you happy, there is a consequence. In this case it's a positive consequence or a reinforcement so therefore the likelihood that you might go to that 7/11 and buy another cup of coffee is pretty high; you have been impacted by ABA in this situation. As we go through the presentation I will explain those principles more so you understand them better. Second example you attend a training on ASD after hours. Here you are, watching this ABA presentations and you could be taking a nap, walking, instead you're watching a presentation on ABA. Why are you doing that? Not for absolutely no reason. There is some benefit you're getting out of it. Perhaps you're learning more about autism so you can be a more effective teacher for your students. Perhaps it's so you can work and support your child at home more effectively or help them with communication more effectively. There is a benefit, a reinforcement that you're getting, which is why you're listening today. Example three. Your parents are copping for a visit so you spend the day cleaning your house. I don't know of too many people who like spending the day cleaning the house, I am one of those people, I certainly don't like it. I tell if you my parents were coming in this weekend I would stop and do that even on a beautiful day like today. Why would I do that? It's applied behavior analysis at work. There is an an seed dent that is triggering my behavior to clean my house. There is a consequence here and maybe I want to avoid my mother telling me how dirty my house is or it's cluttered or she can't believe I live in such squaller, maybe that's what I'm trying to do is avoid that or seek praise from them saying, wow, your house is so clean how do you do that with everything you have going on? These are the principles of ABA. There are three examples that maybe you are familiar with as well. Another example is you're in the grocery store waiting to check out, your child spots something at eye level and begs for you to buy one. You buy the candy because you know he may scream and cry and you're tired and you don't have the energy to deal with it. There are many principles in this example and many of you, especially those who are parents have been in this situation. Let's be clear, the fact that the candy is at eye level that's an ABA principle at work. Organizational management, all of the things dealing with organization and businesses, ABA is a set found additional strategy that's used in businesses and helping with advertisement and to sell you products and those things. So that's on purpose. The fact that your child starts to beg is ears the antecedent, you bought the candy because he was begging for it. When you buy him the candy bar guess what happens? The begging stops. You are then reinforced by buying that candy bar. The fact that you're tired, you've had a long day and you don't have the energy to deal with him getting upset and crying and screaming, that's called a setting event, it also sets up the behavior. There are principles here leading to you buying that candy bar that you may not be aware of. Again, ABA principles in every day life. What we're going to do now is look at a video. This is a video created by Autism Training Solutions a company the out of Hawaii that provides training on evidencedbased practices, so let's look at their overview of ABA.

> The definition of Applied Behavior Analysis is the application of behavior laws to change socially significant behavior to a meaningful degree. Although ABA has recently received attention for being used for children with autism, it has been used for decades to solve many types of behavioral problems. When you watch a show at an animal park you might consider what the whale and trainers had to do to prepare for the show. The whale had been trained for many hours who used the method of ABA. Such as shaping, differential reinforcement and positive reinforcement. ABA is used to teach skills to many populations. It's used in general education classrooms as well as special education classrooms. It's used by businesses to increase employee performance and customer satisfaction. It's also used to change people's behavior in regards to their health and fitness, to name a few. How do you recognize an ABA procedure or program? There are defining characteristics of ABA that make it what it is. Applied behavior analysis is the field of psychology concerned with analyze and go modifying human behavior and solving social and significant problems. ABA focuses on changing behavior rather than labels, cognition or personality. For example, ABA will not decrease autism, rather, it can be used to decrease behavioral deficits and excesses associated with autism. For some children with autism selfstimulation is something that interferes with learn and go socialization. Behavior analysts would use a procedure to decrease the child's selfstimulate her behavior in situations where he can learn and socialize. ABA relies on procedures based on principles of behavior that have been pounded on more than forty years of research across diverse populations. ABA emphasizes the modification of environmental events to change behavior. Data is taken on observable events and analyzed. Once the variables that are controlling the behavior have been identified, they are modified in such a way that the behavior increases or decreases. In the case of Grayson his behavior decreased as appropriate play behaviors were taught.

> I hope you enjoyed that and you got to see some of the applications of ABA. Again, it's use in many different ways and certainly not just with children with autism. Let's get into what is ABA and I'm going to hit you right now with a heavy definition but this is the formal definition. ABA, the process of systematically applying intervention based upon the the principles of behavior to improve socially significant behaviors to a meaningful degree and to demonstrate that the interventions employed are responsible for the improvement in behavior. What? What was that? Wow, that's a mouthful, that's heavy so let me break that down for you. First of all, for it to be Applied Behavior Analysis, the first component of this, "applied" that means systematic. We are going to do it in an organized, structured way so that it is done systematically so that we know the interventions that we're applying and whether or not they are effective. We're not just going to do interventions willynilly and see what works, instead we are going to do it systematically. We are going to apply something, collect data, analyze the data and make determinations on whether or not it's work and go make adjustments based on those decisions. Fits working we continue o if it's not, gosh, maybe we will do more of it or change it up a little bit in some way. What we're going to do then if we look at that last bullet is demonstrate that what we are doing is working. That's the analysis part. So when I say "Applied Behavior Analysis that means we are going to apply it systematically, we are going to make sure what we're doing is working through data collection and analysis. Let's look at that behavior piece. Apply principles of behavior and I'm going to talk about what those principles are throughout the presentation. And if we put those three together, Applied Behavior Analysis, what we're talking about is working on behaviors that are important and meaningful to that person, we're not working on meaningless behaviors, I'm not just trying to get someone to I'm not trying to get a 21 year old to touch his nose, that is meaningless, that does not help him in his life but what I might do is teach the 21 year old how to make a sandwich, how to do a job, I might teach someone how to write an essay, take turns in conversation, those are meaningful behaviors that will help a person with autism, in this case.

The next question I want to ask is why do we use ABA? What is all of this attention and focus on ABA? You go into web sites, you are on TV or open a magazine or newspaper and you might see something about ABA and that's for good reason. It's because it is so effective with this population but we can use ABA to increase skills. I really want to stress, our primary use of ABA is to increase skills. When we say "Applied Behavior Analysis" when we use the term "behavior" what we're really thinking about are the skills that we want to see that student, that child, that adult learn and to start using. Often when we think of the term "behavior" we think of things like hitting and crying and screaming and kicking, yes, those are behaviors but what we're talking about is a more general term of skills. So we can use ABA to increase skills. Let's look at three examples. "Ty will write three photographs about Thomas Edison" we can use ABA to help him do that. "Jackson will take turns while having a conversation" we can use ABA to teach conversational skills. "Shawn will request to use the restroom" we can teach her to request to use the restroom and by the way we can teach her to use the restroom and to be independent, watch our hands afterwards and do all of those skills associated with using the restroom. "Jamal will find his locker and get the books he needs for his next class" we can use the principles of ABA to do all of these steps. Can you imagine the number of steps involved in going to a locker, putting away materials, getting the notebook and books that you need for your next class and moving on? A lot of steps but we can use ABA to teach all of those skills and behaviors. Why else do we use ABA in to reduce behaviors. Let's look at examples here. "Austin will ask for help versus screaming out loud when he needs help" so in this case we would rather not see Austin cream, so we can teach him a more appropriate way to ask for help. "Brandon will wait in line instead of pushing peers" so think about this he is waiting in line at the cafeteria and he starts pushing his Pierce because he is hungry and he wants to get to the front of the line, well this isn't a behavior we want to increase, we want to decrease it. So what we do is teach him how to wait in line. Maddie will listen to a peer versus talking nonstop about ponies."

Now, Maddie likes ponies, and when she approaches a peer it's on and on about ponies and all the different sizes and all kinds of facts about ponies. This isn't a great behavior to make friends and to socialize with her peers. Therefore, we can teach her to listen, and we can teach her to take turns in conversation, instead of talking nonstop about ponies, we can use ABA to do this. I can go on and on and provide you with a lot of examples of how you can use ABA but this gives you a taste for how you may use it with your child or student. We're going to move now into the research on Applied Behavioral Analysis. What I have done in just a few slides is tried to summarize some of the research that's out there on ABA. There is a tremendous amount of research, and I could literally spend this entire hour summarize that go research for you so I have cut it down just to kind of give you a taste of what is available. One of the first reports I want to highlight is something that was done in 2001. This was one of the first reports, a report on autism and how do we effectively educate students with autism. At the time this report came out, a little over a decade going, the research on autism was in a bit of a mess. We had researchers look at intervention and strategies, applying different strategies, there was controversy in the field. One of the things this report did is really kind of took a global look at that research and put it down on paper as to what was effective and what needed to happen, what supports and so on needed to be in place for young children under the age of 8 with autism.

If you have not read this report you can actually Google this and find it free online so I would encourage you to do so even though it was written over a decade ago it's very pertinent and relative today. It was one of the first reports to say, ABA is effective and we need to be using this with our individuals with autism spectrum disorder. It should be used. The second report was one in 2009, a report by the National Autism Center, so you can Google this and find this document, if you do not have it already, and it provided a report on evidencebased practice and autism in the schools. This outlined again, it looked at a comprehensive look at research and practices with autism and it looked at what is considered to be evidencebased and summarize those, what a great and tremendous resource if you do not have this already. Look at that and what you will find ABA is highlighted within this report as being effective with this population. Now, there are over a thousand peer reviewed publications and journals, too many to mention and discuss today. But the peerreview journals are summarizing how ABA is used to teach a breadth of skills. We went over different skills that we can teach, approaching a peer, talking to a peer, using a restroom, waiting in line at the grocery store, making a sandwich, whatever it might be, we have seen ABA being applied in a number of articles.

Now the U.S. Surgeon General has issued a statement on ABA, 30 years of research demonstrated the efficacy of applied behavioral method in reducing inappropriate behavior in an increasing communication, learning and appropriate social behavior," that's a strong endorsement. The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a statement, the effectiveness of ABA has been documented in research by using comprehensive intense active behavioral intervention programs" and I'll let you read the rest of it, but it goes on to show on you it's used in IQ, adapted behavior, including things like feeding one's self, grooming, toileting, moving around, navigating independently and those sorts of things. It has, again, been demonstrated to be effective and say endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Now what I want to do is move into more about the principles of ABA. What is this thing called ABA? ABA makes a couple of different assumptions, and let's talk about those first. It makes the assumption that behavior is learned. Behavior, remember those skills that I'm talking about, it doesn't happen for no reason. We're not talk bug a reflex here, we're not talking about a tick, we're talking about a learned behavior and it's learned because it's impacted by what happens before it and what happens after it. Those are called antecedent and consequences, and we're going to talk about those and what happens before and after in detail in just a minute. And finally all behavior has a function and serves a purpose, otherwise we wouldn't be doing it. Let's go back to the examples that I provided for you earlier on how we use ABA in our own lives. Remember when I mentioned being at a training on autism after work, after a long day, utilized principles of ABA. You're doing that behavior for a reason, if you weren't getting something out of it, to more effectively serve your students, recertification points toward your license, knowledge to be able to help your child communicate, whatever it is, it's serving a function so you're engaging in that behavior. So these are our assumptions.

One of the things I will mention before moving on to the next slide is with ABA we can also use the term "operant conditioning" in other words there are stimuli or events in the environment that shape, mold our behaviors, that change our behaviors over time. So that's another term that you may have heard when it comes to ABA but that directly links back to bullet 2 which is behaviors impacted by what happens before it, what happens after it, with that our behavior is shaped and we change our behaviors and develop new skills over time. All right, what I want to do now is show you two different videos. These are both videos of young children with autism spectrum disorder. I want you to view both and when we come back, I want you to think about which one was ABA. Which one used the principles of ABA and I know we haven't talked about all of those yet but I've given you a lot of examples. Before we go into those principles, which one used ABA, which did not, or maybe as you look at them you might say both of them were ABA, but see if you can figure it out and see if you see any principles of ABA at work. Take a minute to view these videos.