Developing an Educational Program for Children with Autism

Developing an Educational Program for Children with Autism
Mark L. Sundberg, Ph.D., BCBA

Elements of an Educational Program for Children with Autism
Assessment of a child’s needs Identification of an individualized program (IEP) Constructing an individualized curriculum Developing an intervention program Measuring progress (Data collection) On-going analysis and adjustment

Elements of an Educational Program for Children with Autism
Classroom design/daily schedule Creating a language and social skills educational environment Behavior problems Staff training Parent training Integration/inclusion

Assessment of an Individual Child’s Needs
What exactly is it that a child with autism needs to learn, and in what order? The need for a conceptual framework to guide assessment (and intervention) Lots of choices, confusing, too many, no research, lots of money, (currently on the internet, there are 406 different treatments for autism, Romanczyk, 2007) Behavior Analysis (Behavioral Psychology) provides an evidenced-based foundation for understanding the issues affecting children with autism, and for guiding intervention programs

Four Powerful Tools for Children with Autism
1) The basic teaching procedures that form the foundation of Applied Behavior Analysis (or “Behavior Modification,” DTT, ITT, etc.) 2) The functional analysis of behavior (A-B-C), or “behavior analysis” 3) Skinner’s functional analysis of verbal behavior (e.g., mands, tacts, intraverbals) 4) Sign language (and to a lesser degree PECS)

Assessment of an Individual Child’s Needs
Our first task is to identify the existing skills of each child in the classroom Our next task is to identify the language, social, behavioral, and learning barriers that are preventing more rapid learning The failure to conduct an appropriate assessment results in one of the biggest problems in programs that serve children with autism: An inappropriate curriculum We need a tool that is easy to use and will provide teachers, parents, and staff with the necessary information to develop an appropriate intervention program

The Importance of Language and Social Behavior
The primary focus of an intervention program for children with autism should be on the development of effective language and social skills There clearly are several other areas, such as play skills, visual motor skills, fine and gross motor, etc., but language and social skills are typically the most significant deficits for children with autism, and careful training is the key to the most significant gains

What is Language? How do we talk about it? How do we measure it?
What are its parts? How do we assess it? How do we teach it? What theory of language should we use for children with autism?

A Behavioral Approach to Autism Treatment
Behavioral psychology has a lot to offer those who work with children with autism Basic teaching procedures and methodology derived from Applied Behavior Analysis (B-mod, ABA, DTT) These procedures and methods have a solid research foundation that can be easily found in over 1500 empirical studies that have been conducted over the past 60 years

Behavioral Procedures
Reinforcement Prompting Fading Modeling Shaping Chaining Pairing Differential reinforcement procedures (e.g., DRO, DRI, DRL) Intermittent reinforcement procedures (e.g., FR, VR, FI, VI)

Behavioral Procedures
Extinction procedures (e.g., planned ignoring) Punishment procedures (e.g., reprimands, time out) Generalization and maintenance Discrimination training Errorless learning Transfer of stimulus control Task analysis Fluency procedures Contingency contracting Token economies

Additional Behavioral Procedures and Methods
Individualized assessment and intervention program Frequent opportunities to respond Use of discrete trial teaching procedures Incidental & natural environment teaching procedures Data collection Interspersal techniques Behavioral momentum techniques Independent and peer play training Social interaction training Parent and staff training in behavior analysis Functional analyses of problem behavior (Iwata, et al. 1982)

Shaping The differential reinforcement of successive approximations to a target behavior Task analysis (small steps) Changing criteria

The Value of Behavior Analysis for Children With Autism
What else does behavioral psychology have to offer? In addition to the use of specific procedures (e.g., prompting, fading, and differential reinforcement), a second and critical contribution of behavioral psychology involves the “analysis” of the causes of behavior For example, a functional analysis (antecedent-behavior-consequence) is a powerful tool for identifying the causes of problem behavior

Behavioral Psychology: The three-term contingency (An ABC analysis)
Antecedent Behavior Consequence “Come inside” runs away delay to coming in & being chased

The Value of Behavior Analysis for Children With Autism
What else can a behavioral approach offer? Skinner’s analysis of language found in the book Verbal Behavior (Skinner, 1957) Language is learned behavior under the functional control of environmental variables (Skinner, 1957), just like a tantrum The same behavioral principles pioneered by Skinner that provide the foundation of discrete trial training (DDT), applied behavior analysis (ABA), natural environment training (NET), pivotal response training (PRT), etc., also provide the foundation for Skinner’s analysis of language

The Behavioral Classification of Language
Skinner (1957) calls this collection of language skills “The Elementary Verbal Operants” (e.g., mand, tact, echoic, intraverbal, textual) The elementary verbal operants are separate repertoires and functionally independent at the time of acquisition, and each must be taught Speaker and listener skills are separate repertoires and each must be taught More complex language, such as conversations and language related to social skills, is comprised of these basic elements

Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP
Based on Skinner’s (1957) analysis of verbal behavior Based on typical language development milestones By identifying milestones, as opposed to a task analysis of individual skills, the focus can be sharper, and the direction clearer Field test data from approximately 75 typically developing children Field test data from over 150 children with autism Based on the body of empirical research that provides the foundation of Behavior Analysis Based on the empirical research on Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior

Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP
There are four components of the VB-MAPP The VB-MAPP: Skills Assessment contains 165 verbal behavior milestones across 3 developmental levels (0-18 mos., mos., mos.) and 16 different verbal operants and related skills The VB-MAPP: Skills Task Analysis provides a further breakdown of the different skill areas in the form of a checklist for skills tracking The VB MAPP: Barriers Assessment examines 22 common learning and language barriers faced by children with autism The VB-MAPP: IEP Goals provides over 200 IEP objectives directly linked to the skills and barriers assessments, and verbal behavior intervention program (Sundberg, in preparation)

Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Skills Assessment
The assessment is designed to identify the child’s existing language and related skills An assessment should probe a representative sample of a repertoire Typical verbal milestones can provide the frame for the sample Typical verbal milestones can help to avoid focusing on only minor steps Typical verbal milestones can help to avoid targeting skills for intervention that are developmentally inappropriate IEP goals can match the milestones, not individual skills

The 16 skills assessed on the VB-MAPP include: The elementary verbal operants (e.g., echoic, imitation, mand, tact, intraverbal) The listener skills Vocal output Play and social skills Visual perceptual skills, and matching-to-sample Grammatical and syntactical skills Group and classroom skills Beginning academic skills

The milestones are broken into three developmental levels (see Skills Form) Level 1: 0-18 months Level 2: months Level 3: months The scores for each skill are approximately balanced across each level There are 5 items and 5 possible points for each skill area (e.g., level 1, tact) There are three boxes in all sections for three separate administrations (See Tact Assessment Form Sample) Each of the 165 items is scored 0, 1, or 1/2 based on the criteria in the VB-MAPP instruction manual Looking for the operant level; If the skill is below the operant level score quickly and move on, if it is close to the operant level, test it

VB-MAPP Level 1: Tact

The total for the five items is marked on the top of each skill area The totals for each skill area are added for all three levels and placed on the VB-MAPP Scoring Form There are three sub-tests: Echoic Listener Responding by Function, Feature, and Class (LRFFC) Intraverbal The total score on the sub-test is converted to a milestone score on the VB- MAPP forms The items on these sub-tests, as well as the VB-MAPP in general, have been adjusted many times based on the field-test data (See VB-MAPP Assessment Forms) VB-MAPP samples

VB-MAPPS for Typically Developing Children
Lisa Hale Mark L. Sundberg Rikki Roden Carl T. Sundberg Cindy A. Sundberg

VB-MAPPs for Children with Autism
Mark L. Sundberg Carl T. Sundberg Shannon Rosenhan Shannon Montano Kaisa Weathers

Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: Skills Task Analysis
The milestones can be considered floors in a building, and the task analysis contains the steps between each floor There are 165 milestones and approximately 600 total tasks in the VB-MAPP task analysis The task analysis form also allows for more detailed skills tracking

Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment
It is important to find out what a child can do (The VB-MAPP Skills Assessment), but also important to know what they can’t do, and analyze why they can’t do it The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment is a tool that is designed to identify and score 22 different learning and language acquisition barriers Once a specific barrier has been identified, a more detailed descriptive and/or functional analysis of that problem is required There are many ways that a verbal repertoire or related skill can become defective, and an individualized analysis will be necessary to determine what the nature of the problem is for a specific child, and what intervention program might be appropriate

Common Learning and Language Acquisition Barriers
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Common Learning and Language Acquisition Barriers Instructional control (Escape/avoidance) Behavior problems Defective mand Defective tact Defective motor imitation Defective echoic (e.g., echolalia) Defective matching-to-sample

Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Common Learning and Language Acquisition Barriers Defective listener repertoires (e.g., LD, LRFFC) Defective intraverbal Defective play and social skills Prompt dependent, long latencies Scrolling responses Defective scanning skills Failure to make conditional discriminations (CDs) Failure to generalize

Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Common Learning and Language Acquisition Barriers Weak or atypical MOs Response requirements weakens the MO Self-stimulation Articulation problems Obsessive-compulsive behavior Reinforcement dependent Does not attend to people/materials

Scoring the VB-MAPP Barriers Form
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Scoring the VB-MAPP Barriers Form Rate the child on the VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Form using a Likert-type scale of 1 to 5 A score of 1 or 2 would indicate that there are no significant barriers, and a formal intervention plan may not be required. A score of 3, 4, or 5 would indicate that there is a barrier, that probably should be addressed as part of the intervention program For some children the immediate focus of the intervention program is on removing a particular barrier, rather than language instruction The most common immediate barriers to remove involve instructional control problems, or other behavior problems

Defective Verbal Behavior
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Defective Verbal Behavior A descriptive functional analysis of verbal behavior (Skinner, Chap 1) A behavioral analysis of words, phrases, and sentences emitted by children with autism Same basic principles of behavior as nonverbal behavior What is the source of control? These sources of control will often reveal that what appears to be a correct response in form is actually incorrect in function Might not be the same source of control observed in a typically developing child (e.g., I have a red shirt on) Each verbal operant can be susceptible to unwanted sources of control

Defective Verbal Behavior
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Defective Verbal Behavior Defective mands (I want candy. What’s that?) Defective tacts (Bounce ball, Black car, Under table) Defective intraverbal responses (Poopies evoked by What do you smell in the oven?) The behavior analyst must determine what the correct source of control should be, and how that source can be established The functional analysis of verbal behavior is on-going The failure to conduct such an analysis may result in rote or defective verbal repertoires that can become difficult to change This is how behavior analysis is different, this is what we do

An Analysis of a Defective Mand Repertoire
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment An Analysis of a Defective Mand Repertoire A substantial number of children with autism have an absent, weak, or defective mand repertoire Many of these same children have extensive tact and listener skills, as well as other elevated scores on the VB-MAPP Skills assessment Often, under these circumstances it is not uncommon to see the child engage in a tantrum or some other form of negative behavior as a mand A word acquired under SD control may not automatically transfer to MO control This distinction between SD and MO antecedent control is not systematically incorporated into many of the popular language assessment and intervention programs designed for children with autism There are many potential causes of a defective mand repertoire and a functional analysis is necessary to determine the cause for an individual child

Potential causes of an absent, weak, or defective mand repertoire.
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Potential causes of an absent, weak, or defective mand repertoire. Mand training is not part of the child’s early language training history The target response form is too difficult for the child When a child has no or limited vocal behavior, sign language or PECS has not been tried The response requirement is too high and weakens the relevant MO There is no current MO in effect for targeted item (e.g., satiation, weak to begin with) The response is prompt bound by physical, echoic, imitative, or verbal stimuli A nonverbal stimulus acquires control of the response and blocks MO control A verbal stimulus acquires control of the response and blocks MO control Motivation (MO) does not control the response form

Potential causes of an absent, weak, or defective mand repertoire
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Potential causes of an absent, weak, or defective mand repertoire The child has weak MOs in general Free or cheap access to reinforcers without manding Self-stimulation or obsessive behaviors compete with other MOs A small group of mands has a strong history of reinforcement (e.g., cookies, juice, Skittles) There is a limited availability of established imitative or echoic responses No variation in captured or contrived MOs Negative behavior functions as mands Inappropriate mands become too strong and are intermittently reinforced The curriculum is poorly sequenced Fading out the object/nonverbal stimulus too soon

Potential causes of an absent, weak, or defective mand repertoire
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Potential causes of an absent, weak, or defective mand repertoire A single response topography functions as the mand (e.g., more, please, that) Can’t establish differential response topographies Scrolling gets reinforced Not enough mand trials are provided each day Poor audience control Mands only required and reinforced in specific setting Generalization training is not provided Verbal information does not function as reinforcement for the child Manding does not come under the control of natural contingencies A history of punishment for attempts at manding

Potential causes of scrolling
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Potential causes of scrolling Responses that are first trained are not completely acquired (weak SD control) Failure to identify that scrolling is occurring The response is actually under a specific type of prompt rather than the target SD The amount of discrimination training is insufficient New words/signs are added too quickly Scrolling gets intermittently reinforced New stimuli and new responses are too similar For mands, new MOs and specific reinforcement are similar to the earlier ones Maintenance and generalization trials are insufficient Failure to reinforce first wrong response evokes the next response Curriculum is out of sequence Scrolling is less work than discriminating

Instructional control/non-compliance (escape and avoidance)
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Instructional control/non-compliance (escape and avoidance) Many children with autism have learned to emit a variety of negative and disruptive behaviors to avoid or terminate demands placed upon them (CMO-R) These behaviors range from mild behaviors such as looking away or not responding, to severe aggressive and self-injurious behaviors However, the function of the behaviors is often the same: to escape from doing things they don’t want to do (e.g., hair brushing, car seats, instructional demands), or any stimuli that indicate that unwanted things or activities are coming (avoidance) (e.g., bedtime, turning off the TV, table tasks) These types of behaviors are common in typically developing children, but can become quite severe for a child with autism There are a number of potential causes for instructional control problems. It is the job of the behavior analyst conduct a descriptive and/or functional analysis to determine the specific cause for each individual child

Potential causes of noncompliant behaviors
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Potential causes of noncompliant behaviors Avoidance or escape of the demand is (negatively) reinforced (not followed through) The child has a long history of successful avoidance and escape behavior Extinction bursts are reinforced Intermittent reinforcement develops persistence Positive reinforcement also follows the negative behaviors Not enough reinforcement is provided for compliance Effective reinforcers are not identified, or they cannot compete with negative reinforcement The demand is too high (e.g., task expectations and curriculum issues) The demands are unclear or vague The demand require that the child give up powerful reinforcers The demands are in the form of threats (coercive) The steps to successful compliance are too large The intervention program is inconsistent

An Analysis of a Defective Tact Repertoire
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment An Analysis of a Defective Tact Repertoire The tact repertoire is less susceptible to becoming defective than the mand or intraverbal, due in part, to the nature of the controlling variables for the tact Nonverbal stimulus control is more measurable and accessible, and in general, much clearer than motivational control (mand), and verbal stimulus control (intraverbal) It is often the case that the wrong nonverbal stimulus acquires control of a tact For example, when teaching tacts related to verbs, the goal is that the specific moving nonverbal stimulus evokes a specific response, not the object related to the movement Some children learn to emit a word that is a verb in form but not in function, as in the response Drinking juice when just shown a cup, or Throwing ball when shown a ball Similar problems can be observed in efforts to teach tacts related to prepositions and adjectives (e.g., above and below, big and little) Gone unchecked, these tacting errors can be difficult to change and can become the source of other verbal problems later in training, such as intraverbal rote responding

Some common causes of an absent, weak, or defective tact repertoire
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Some common causes of an absent, weak, or defective tact repertoire A limited amount of formal tact training has been provided Other barriers such as instructional control dominate the educational activities Articulation is unintelligible, and augmentative communication has not been tried Tacting is prompt bound by echoic, imitative, or other SDs (e.g., lip prompts) Scrolling through targeted tacts gets reinforced Single response tacts have been over conditioned Limited training with multiple SDs and multiple response tacting The wrong source of control is established (e.g., tacting verbs or emotions from pictures)

Some common causes of an absent, weak, or defective tact repertoire
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Some common causes of an absent, weak, or defective tact repertoire Failure to analyze complexities of tacts involving prepositions, pronouns, adjectives, private events, social behavior, etc. Verbal stimuli do not establish a feature of nonverbal stimuli as an SD (IV/Tact combo) Poorly sequenced curriculum Generalization training is not provided (stimulus and response classes) No spontaneous tacting due to additional prompts in training (SD effect) No spontaneous tacting due to aversive variables present in training (MO-Reflexive) Tacting not reinforced by natural or automatic contingencies The child has a punishment history for tacting Excessive or inappropriate tacting gets reinforced

An Analysis of a Defective Intraverbal Repertoire
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment An Analysis of a Defective Intraverbal Repertoire Intraverbal behavior is most prone to becoming rote for children with autism The task of directly teaching intraverbal behavior is complicated and endless Early intraverbal training is pretty straight forward, but by 3-4 years of age, a typical child acquires 1000s of different intraverbal relations Most adults have hundreds of thousands of different intraverbal relations as a part of their verbal repertoires (e.g., newspaper, books, the internet) Contact with these verbal stimuli can evoke numerous intraverbal responses, such as discussions of the facts (e.g., global warming, autism, SD vs. the MO) The number of different intraverbal relations far outnumbers the number of different mands and tacts. The frequency of mands may be greater than intraverbals, but often the mands are related to a relatively small set of MOs Language would be simple if a verbal repertoire was like a passenger list on a ship or plane (Skinner, 1957)

Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment An Analysis of a Defective Intraverbal Repertoire Many children with autism have a great deal of difficulty acquiring meaningful intraverbal behavior. Some have acquired 100s of tacts and LDs, but fail to acquire more than a few simple intraverbal relations Tacting, imitation, echoic, matching, LDs, textual, and transcriptive have a degree of sameness that may come easier for children with autism than intraverbal behavior Not only are the antecedents for these repertoires more consistent and clearer, but also the response is frequently the same (A spoon is usually Spoon, 2 is always Two) Intraverbal relations, by their very nature, involve constantly changing SDs and responses For example, a tree is always a tree for echoic, tacting, matching, etc., but the discussion about trees can be comprised of hundreds, if not thousands, of different intraverbal relations Furthermore, the discussion about trees may never occur exactly the same way each time However, this type of defective intraverbal behavior is not uncommon for some high functioning individuals with autism, and especially those with Aspergers

Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment An Analysis of a Defective Intraverbal Repertoire Verbal SDs are usually much more complicated than the nonverbal SDs Verbal SDs usually contain multiple components, occurring in a brief time frame Multiple words as SDs almost always involve verbal conditional discriminations Vocal verbal stimuli are transitory, nonverbal stimuli tend to be more static Attending to verbal SDs is often more laborious than attending to nonverbal SDs Visual stimuli may block the establishment of control by verbal stimuli Many words that are not clearly evoked by a corresponding nonverbal stimulus (e.g., the, a, can’t, usually, if, its, for, of, anyway, whatever) but form the VCDs IV responses are typically more complex than responses associated with tacts The MLU of a tact tends to be much shorter than the MLU for an intraverbal There is often only so much that can be said about a specific nonverbal stimulus (e.g., the tact bike vs, IV story about a bike) The tact response is often shaped to include only the salient information

Some common causes of an absent, weak, or defective intraverbal repertoire The child has not received formal intraverbal training The child is given training, but it’s too early to focus on intraverbals The child’s echoic repertoire is too strong (echolalia) Nonverbal stimuli control response form (tact prompt bound) MOs control response forms (strong IVs on favorite topics) The intraverbal curriculum is out of developmental and behavioral sequence Rote intraverbal responses have been firmly established due to conditioning history Out of context or irrelevant intraverbal training may establish odd forms of IV behavior Single verbal stimuli and single verbal responses have been over conditioned

Some common causes of an absent, weak, or defective intraverbal repertoire The specific target responses are not in the child’s repertoire as tacts, LDs, or LRFFCs The child does not attend to multiple verbal stimuli (S-deltas) The child does not have sufficient training on verbal conditional discriminations Verbal stimulus classes have not been established Verbal response classes have not been established Poor audience control No automatic reinforcement for IV behavior A punishment history for intraverbal behavior An extinction history for intraverbal behavior

An Analysis of a Defective Listener Repertoire
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment An Analysis of a Defective Listener Repertoire The behavior of the listener involves several independent repertoires The listener as an audience for the verbal behavior of others The listener’s nonverbal behavior evoked by the words of others The listener’s covert verbal behavior evoked by the words of others (this part is actually speaker behavior, but commonly and erroneously referred to as listener, or receptive, behavior.

Some Common Causes of an Absent, Weak, or
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Some Common Causes of an Absent, Weak, or Defective Listener Repertoire The speech of others does not function as a conditioned reinforcer The speech of others does not function as an SD for attending The child does not reinforce the verbal behavior of others The child does not mediate reinforcement for the verbal behavior of others The child has not become an SD for certain verbal behavior from others The child has not received formal listener training Scrolling get reinforced in listener training Inadvertent prompts control correct responses (eye gazes, position, hand placement)

Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Some Common Causes of an Absent, Weak, or Defective Listener Repertoire The child has a weak conditional discrimination repertoire Verbal stimuli does not evoke scanning (or attending to the array) The child has been over conditioned with limited array The child has been over conditioned with single stimulus and single response Generalization training has not provided (stimulus and response classes) The child stims with the materials No LRFFC training has been provided The curriculum is poorly sequenced

matching-to-sample repertoire
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Some common causes of an absent, weak, or defective visual perception and matching-to-sample repertoire The child may have some type of vision impairment The child has not received formal training on visual discrimination tasks Adults have poor instructional control The child stims with materials The targeted visual tasks are out of developmental sequence (curriculum) The child is prompt bound by position, body movement, eye or pointing prompts, etc. There is a reinforcement history for position preference, or specific response patterns Scrolling behavior gets reinforced A verbal consequence like No is really an SD to pick another item

matching-to-sample repertoire
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Some common causes of an absent, weak, or defective visual perception and matching-to-sample repertoire If no reinforcement is provided for first selection, the child quickly selects another item There is a failure to scan visual arrays and comparisons efficiently There is a failure to make conditional discriminations Over conditioning with a small array (limited array variation) The task is too easy because the comparison stimuli are very different from each other Limited training with large arrays, scenes, and arrays in the natural environment Limited training with similar stimuli in the array Limited training with large arrays and similar stimuli in scenes and in the natural environment

Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Some Common Causes of an Absent, Weak, or Defective Listener Repertoire The child has a weak conditional discrimination repertoire Verbal stimuli does not evoke scanning (or attending to the array) The child has been over conditioned with limited array The child has been over conditioned with single stimulus and single response Generalization training has not provided (stimulus and response classes) The child stims with the materials No LRFFC training has been provided The curriculum is poorly sequenced

Some common causes of an absent, weak, or defective echoic repertoire
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Some common causes of an absent, weak, or defective echoic repertoire Physiological variables (e.g., weak muscle control, severe illnesses, cerebral palsy) Little or no training or encouragement of echoic responding has been provided Weak automatic reinforcement for echoic and vocal behavior Possible automatic punishment (or other forms of punishment) for vocal behavior The child demonstrates a low rate of babbling or vocal play Adults have poor instructional control Vocal self-stimulation interferes with echoic development

Some common causes of an absent, weak, or defective echoic repertoire
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Some common causes of an absent, weak, or defective echoic repertoire The child has weak MOs for social interaction with other people The child doesn’t attend to vocal stimuli The targeted vocal sounds, blends, and words are out of developmental sequence The child has an aversive (failure) history regarding attempts to teach echoic behavior Generalization training has not been provided Repertoire too strong (echolalia, prompt bound) Automatic reinforcement for out-of-context verbal responses (“Delayed echolalia”)

Potential causes of scrolling
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Potential causes of scrolling Responses that are first trained are not completely acquired (weak SD control) Failure to identify that scrolling is occurring The response is actually under a specific type of prompt rather than the target SD The amount of discrimination training is insufficient New words/signs are added too quickly Scrolling gets intermittently reinforced New stimuli and new responses are too similar For mands, new MOs and specific reinforcement are similar to the earlier ones Maintenance and generalization trials are insufficient Failure to reinforce first wrong response evokes the next response Curriculum is out of sequence Scrolling is less work than discriminating

Instructional control/non-compliance (escape and avoidance)
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Instructional control/non-compliance (escape and avoidance) Many children with autism have learned to emit a variety of negative and disruptive behaviors to avoid or terminate demands placed upon them (CMO-R) These behaviors range from mild behaviors such as looking away or not responding, to severe aggressive and self-injurious behaviors However, the function of the behaviors is often the same: to escape from doing things they don’t want to do (e.g., hair brushing, car seats, instructional demands), or any stimuli that indicate that unwanted things or activities are coming (avoidance) (e.g., bedtime, turning off the TV, table tasks) These types of behaviors are common in typically developing children, but can become quite severe for a child with autism There are a number of potential causes for instructional control problems. It is the job of the behavior analyst conduct a descriptive and/or functional analysis to determine the specific cause for each individual child

Potential causes of noncompliant behaviors
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment Potential causes of noncompliant behaviors Avoidance or escape of the demand is (negatively) reinforced (not followed through) The child has a long history of successful avoidance and escape behavior Extinction bursts are reinforced Intermittent reinforcement develops persistence Positive reinforcement also follows the negative behaviors Not enough reinforcement is provided for compliance Effective reinforcers are not identified, or they cannot compete with negative reinforcement The demand is too high (e.g., task expectations and curriculum issues) The demands are unclear or vague The demand require that the child give up powerful reinforcers The demands are in the form of threats (coercive) The steps to successful compliance are too large The intervention program is inconsistent

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Developing an Educational Program for Children with Autism

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