Word: behavior
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...past 20 years, the dominant way to work with autistic children has been based on Applied Behavior Analysis. ABA derives from the classic work of psychologist B.F. Skinner, who showed--mostly in animals--that behavior can be altered with carefully repeated drills and rewards. In 1987, Ivar Lovaas at UCLA published a small study with huge repercussions. He reported that 9 out of 19 autistic children taught for 40 hours a week with behaviorist methods had big jumps in IQ and were able to pass first grade; only 1 out of 40 in control groups...
Recent years have brought questions about the ABA model. When Lovaas protégé Tristram Smith tried to replicate the 1987 findings in a 2000 study, he got a more modest success rate on academic measures and virtually no gains in social behavior. Others, meanwhile, have devised new ways of working with autistic kids. One of the best known was developed by child psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan, who spent 15 years studying infant development at the National Institute of Mental Health. His method, called DIR (developmental, individual-difference, relationship based), has as its premise the idea that an exchange of emotional signals...
Taylor says 29% of her students, most from ages 5 to 8, get mainstreamed into regular schools, generally with an aide. Many who remain at Alpine have limited language skills; some of the older students use electronic devices to express basic desires. The ritualistic behavior that is characteristic of autism is strongly suppressed. "Hands down," says a teacher to a child who begins to flap. "We're not a culture that accepts that," says Taylor. "Fifty percent of the battle is addressing behavior to look good...
...Robotic behavior, lack of emotion and inability to use trained skills outside school are some of the shortcomings critics attribute to ABA. A boy who has learned to play Nintendo games at Alpine, for instance, reverts to simply switching the game on and off when at home. Proponents concede certain weak points, but they also note a long record of results. Says Tristram Smith of the University of Rochester: "Anything outside ABA is basically experimental at this point...
...enrolled Nate in the Boston Higashi School in Randolph, Mass., because I knew he was now capable of more (though I had no idea what "more" was). After years of day school followed by speech, occupational and behavior therapy, Nate had no master plan connecting everything. And I constantly worried that his ritualistic behaviors--like his insistence on sitting in the same seat in the last row of the city bus and crawling over anyone to get there--were never going to decrease...