A better, much better way of teaching autistic kids
Click here for a report on a study done by Case Western Reserve University
Autism Diva is a psychology major (a bit old for one, but a psychology major, just the same) at a university in the University of California system. Autism Diva knows from her classes that for the most part behaviorism died back in the 1970's and 1980's. It is passé. It draws mere ennui from neuroscientists. It is seen as quite inferior to cognitive psychology these days, and quite limited in it's legitimate uses (e.g. designing profit making slot machines).
Yet, by far the majority of "experts" today consider it as the only choice for training the developmentally different, the "mentally retarded" and autistic. After all, you don't reason with a chicken when you teach it to play the piano, no, you just create rewards and/or punishments to shape the behavior of the chicken until it learns to peck at pieces of corn placed on a toy piano's keyboard.
"Everyone knows" these days that autistics are "far-gone mental cripples" as they were called in the LIFE magazine article of 1965 called, "Screams, Slaps and Love". Since they are "far-gone mental cripples" they need to be taught like BF Skinner taught lab animals. The LIFE magazine article is about Ivar Lovaas (pronounced Loovas). He is like a god to most parents of autistic children these days. He invented the belief that one can cure an autistic child by using behaviorism. Autism Diva is NOT exaggerating.
He started out using abusive punishments and m&m's to train autistic kids, now his followers uses "affection" and m&m's as far as Autism Diva can tell.
When one reads the popular press one frequently reads stuff like, "it costs $50,000 a year to treat an autistic child". Expensive Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) is being held up as a life saving medical treatment, not unlike dialysis or a heart transplant, by parents in Canada who with their lawyers are arguing this in various courts thus using emotional blackmail to try to force agencies to pay for this for all the autistic kids in Canada, lest they remain "far-gone mental cripples" whose parent's openly wish could have died rather than be forced to live this empty shell-like existence.
Now,
along come those pesky folks at Case Western Reserve saying something that actually has been shown in studies going back several years, that there is a better, much, much better way to teach autistic kids. It doesn't involve counting their behaviors on a piece of paper clipped to a clipboard (as ABA therapists do) or constantly prompting the child to do something exactly as told to do it, and repeating the action a ridiculous number of times after it has been successfully learned ("put the lid on the box 50 more times and you'll get a cookie!"). The good way to teach autistic kids looks like the way most parents teach their children, in a natural manner with fun and reciprocity. It also doesn't cost $50,000 a year.
ABA (also called Intensive Behavior Intervention [IBI]and Discrete Trial Training - [DTT]) has held sway as the main way to train autistic kids how to "behave" for many years.
Autism Diva has held it to be medieval and has wished it's death many times. She hopes that studies like these will be the death knell for behaviorism, except in teaching animals to "behave".
Autism Diva
behaviorism is dead
Autism Diva is a psychology major (a bit old for one, but a psychology major, just the same) at a university in the University of California system. Autism Diva knows from her classes that for the most part behaviorism died back in the 1970's and 1980's. It is passé. It draws mere ennui from neuroscientists. It is seen as quite inferior to cognitive psychology these days, and quite limited in it's legitimate uses (e.g. designing profit making slot machines).
Yet, by far the majority of "experts" today consider it as the only choice for training the developmentally different, the "mentally retarded" and autistic. After all, you don't reason with a chicken when you teach it to play the piano, no, you just create rewards and/or punishments to shape the behavior of the chicken until it learns to peck at pieces of corn placed on a toy piano's keyboard.
"Everyone knows" these days that autistics are "far-gone mental cripples" as they were called in the LIFE magazine article of 1965 called, "Screams, Slaps and Love". Since they are "far-gone mental cripples" they need to be taught like BF Skinner taught lab animals. The LIFE magazine article is about Ivar Lovaas (pronounced Loovas). He is like a god to most parents of autistic children these days. He invented the belief that one can cure an autistic child by using behaviorism. Autism Diva is NOT exaggerating.
He started out using abusive punishments and m&m's to train autistic kids, now his followers uses "affection" and m&m's as far as Autism Diva can tell.
When one reads the popular press one frequently reads stuff like, "it costs $50,000 a year to treat an autistic child". Expensive Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) is being held up as a life saving medical treatment, not unlike dialysis or a heart transplant, by parents in Canada who with their lawyers are arguing this in various courts thus using emotional blackmail to try to force agencies to pay for this for all the autistic kids in Canada, lest they remain "far-gone mental cripples" whose parent's openly wish could have died rather than be forced to live this empty shell-like existence.
Now,
along come those pesky folks at Case Western Reserve saying something that actually has been shown in studies going back several years, that there is a better, much, much better way to teach autistic kids. It doesn't involve counting their behaviors on a piece of paper clipped to a clipboard (as ABA therapists do) or constantly prompting the child to do something exactly as told to do it, and repeating the action a ridiculous number of times after it has been successfully learned ("put the lid on the box 50 more times and you'll get a cookie!"). The good way to teach autistic kids looks like the way most parents teach their children, in a natural manner with fun and reciprocity. It also doesn't cost $50,000 a year.
Promise of effective treatment for autism and other developmental disorders at a far lower cost
Medical Study News
Published: Tuesday, 12-Apr-2005
Parents of autistic children can spend as much as $50,000 a year on therapies for their children. But a new study from Case Western Reserve University's Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences shows promise of providing effective treatment for autism and other developmental disorders at a far lower cost.
Gerald Mahoney, the Verna Houck Motto Professor for Families and Communities and co-director of the Center on Intervention for Children and Families at the Mandel School, and Frida Perales, a research associate, conducted a year-long study of the effectiveness of "responsive teaching" strategies for parents to help their autistic children develop and use pivotal developmental behaviors.
Responsive teaching strategies promote parent interactions with their children through strategies such as "follow the child's lead" and "take one turn and wait." The results of their study appear in an article in the April 2005 issue of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.
Mahoney and Perales compared the effects of the responsive teaching strategies on 50 children and their mothers, divided into two groups: children with pervasive developmental disorders, or PDDs (primarily autism), and children with other types of developmental disorders. The researchers investigated how these responsive teaching strategies helped parents' interaction with their children and improved children's development.
The study found that the responsive teaching strategies improved parents' responsiveness with their children, and were highly effective at enhancing children's developmental growth. Both groups of children made an overall 60 percent increase in their rate of cognitive development and a 150 percent increase in their rate of language development. The technique was also effective at reducing the social/emotional problems of the children with PDDs. "Although many professionals have speculated that interventions that encourage parents to become more responsive can be effective at promoting children's socioemotional well-being, this is the first long-term intervention study to actually demonstrate this effect," the authors write.
Equally important, the improvements occurred with an average of just 32 sessions with early intervention specialists, a relatively modest level of contact. The annual average costs for such interventions are about $5,000, a fraction of the annual costs of most existing interventions for children with PDDs.
The results also challenge the idea that only highly structured interventions can help children with PDDs, say the authors, since the less-structured procedures, which have aided the cognitive and language development of children with developmental disabilities, address those same needs in children with PDDs.
ABA (also called Intensive Behavior Intervention [IBI]and Discrete Trial Training - [DTT]) has held sway as the main way to train autistic kids how to "behave" for many years.
Autism Diva has held it to be medieval and has wished it's death many times. She hopes that studies like these will be the death knell for behaviorism, except in teaching animals to "behave".
Autism Diva
behaviorism is dead
posted by Autism Diva at 12:24 AM
1 Comments:
Behaviorism is misrepresented in academia- Real Behaviorism shows that positive rewards are always, always superior to punishments. Read about behaviorism outside of the Psych 101 textbooks, and you'll see, its actually about gentle, positive treatment without fishing around people's private thoughts and personalities. As a psych student I thought as you did- but behaviorism is much better than the cognitive psychobabble of fashionable therapists
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