ABA Teaching Tools
Active Student Responding
A classroom teaching technique that increases participation and decreases disruption is active student responding (ASR). Active student responding measures include guided notes, response cards, and choral responding. Each have their advantages and times in which they may be more useful than another. The benefits to active student responding is that it allows for informal assessment of student skills, provides increased opportunity to respond (and receive reinforcement), teachers report that methods are easy to implement, and students report finding it to be fun!
Activity Schedules
Activity schedules are visual or textual prompts that promote engagement of leisure skills, increase appropriate toy play, and facilitate independence with familiar routines. With an activity schedule, there is one item or activity depicted per page. The child initiates, completes, and terminates the activity on their own. The length of the activity can vary depending on the skill level of the child. With systematic planning, children can willingly engage with these activity play books in a way that is meaningful for the child and their family. Activity schedules have also been evaluated as tools for facilitating peer engagement. Read the study
Behavior Contracts
A behavior contract is a plan of action that is negotiated between a client, child, spouse, etc. and concerned others. Often the behavior contract will include both short- and long-term goals. The contract objectively specifies what is expected of the person and the consequences that follow behavior.
Essentially, behavior contracts state:
1) what the rule or expectation is
2) what reward or reinforcer is available for desired behavior
3) outcome/consequence is delivered for undesired behavior
While it is easy to "assume" that students "know" the rules, it is often better to ensure that all expectations are clearly outlined. Sometimes putting them in writing (or using visuals) can be very helpful.
Discrete Trial Teaching
Explicit teaching of skills in discrete, basic behaviors. With discrete trial teaching, an instruction is given, a response occurs (or is prompted to occur), and reinforcement (or feedback) is given. The premise behind discrete trial teaching is increased opportunities for repeated instruction, modeling, feedback and reinforcement. The goal of discrete trial teaching is to generalize the skill to the natural environment, with people and across places other than where the skill was explicitly taught. Instruction is often conducted at a table-top. Based on applications of behavior analysis as researched by Lovaas. More information on discrete trial teaching (DTT)
Incidental Teaching
"Incidental teaching provides structured learning opportunities in the natural environment by using the child's interests and natural motivation. Incidental teaching was developed to increase language and social responses by maximizing the power of reinforcement and encouraging generalization (Hart & Risley, 1968, 1974)". The idea behind incidental teaching is an elaboration of language (e.g. instead of "car", you may ask, "which car" to increase the likelihood that the chid will say "blue car" or "big car".) "Those primarily focused on developing and using strategies embedded in natural settings that promote generalization refer to their interventions as naturalistic teaching approaches (NTAs)" (Leblanc et al., 2006).
Task Analysis
A task analysis requires breaking larger skills/routines into small, discrete steps. This can be a helpful tool for sequencing and chaining together multiple behaviors to complete larger tasks. A task analysis (TA) easily lends itself to include a self-monitoring component. The individual can use the steps as a guide/reminder of which steps to complete and in which order. It can also be used to rate one's own performance. Self-monitoring is important when developing independence and in teaching reflection and developing perspective.