| Early Intensive Behavioral
Intervention Programs for Children with Autism
or at risk of Autism:
In the spring of 2005, Counseling & Consulting
Services (CCS) began, in cooperation with the
Division of Developmental Disabilities (DDD),
a one-year Pilot Project. This project,
originally proposed by Philip Johnson, M.S., was
to provide assessment-based Early Intensive
Behavioral Intervention (EIBI) for children
with autism, or at risk of autism, under the age
of three. Since its inception, the Pilot Program
has been serving nearly thirty children statewide.
In early 2006, DDD extended the project to serve
the original referral group until those children
reach age five, as well as provide new referrals.
Additionally, CCS Consultants provide private
EIBI services to older children with autism.
EIBI are primarily home-based and parent-directed
intervention programs. Therefore, much of
the responsibility for implementing each program
is delegated to the parent. Parents are expected
to be closely involved throughout the entire intervention
process by:
- Providing critical information during the
initial assessment
- Collecting data
- Assisting with the training and monitoring
of their child’s habilitation trainers
- Assisting with the identification and development
of new habilitation goals and objectives
- Actively participating as a member of their
child’s habilitation team
Consultant-based EIBI programs are designed
to utilize each child’s strengths while
addressing their unique challenges. The objectives
and goals of each individualized intervention
program focuses on social skills acquisition,
communication, functional skills acquisition,
and reduction of interfering behaviors. Intervention
programs are based upon an applied behavioral
analysis (ABA) model, with the contingent use
of positive reinforcement to strengthen the occurrence
of desirable behaviors.
Intervention Plans include the following
components:
- Operational definitions of the behaviors
that are to be acquired, increased, reduced,
or eliminated
- Detailed descriptions of objectives, goals,
and strategies
- Ongoing data collection throughout the assessment
and intervention phases of the plan.
When designing each child’s Intervention
Plan, CCS Consultants include the following:
- Utilize information and data collected from
observations and interviews conducted at home
and at school
- Skills to be taught are broken down into
incremental steps that can be easily mastered
- The steps progress from simple to complex,
so as to shape their development and acquisition.
- Teaching programs utilize the following instructional
techniques: modeling, shaping, fading, and chaining.
|
Marriage
& Relationships
