


  • qualities of an effective ABA program
  • transdisciplinary teamwork
  • curriculum selection and development
  • program writing and revision
  • strategies for attention and engagement
  • prompts
  • error- correction
  • reinforcement
  • progress evaluation
  • data-based decision-making



Productive Meetings in Home ABA Programs



Answered by Preeti Chojar, Mother and ASAT Board Member


Meeting composition

Productive Meetings in Home ABA ProgramsDevelop the agenda


Circulate the agenda


Continue reading

Tip of the Week: Consider Response Effort in Your Intervention

Several previous posts have discussed how important it is to have a multi-pronged approach to behavior interventions, including definitions for how caregivers will respond to undesirable behavior, the replacement behavior, and reinforcement. One thing I have not shared is considering response effort when choosing a replacement behavior.

Response effort describes how easy or difficult it is to engage in a behavior. For example, I frequently check my e-mail on my phone. Occasionally, I get an e-mail that requires a lengthy reply. The response effort for typing on the tiny touchpad is much greater than sitting down at my laptop and using the keyboard, so I wait until I can go to my computer to reply to that e-mail. Typing on the keyboard requires less response effort.

In general, when we make choices about how to behave, whether we are aware of it or not, we choose the behavior that gets the best results with the least response effort. But if a low response effort achieves poor results, we’re probably not going to engage in that behavior. Let’s look at an example of choosing a higher response effort. Let’s say I live down the street from a hair salon, and I go there once but hate my hair cut. I’ll engage in the higher response effort to drive 30 minutes to a salon that gives me a great cut. I want the lowest response effort, but not if it achieves poor results.

So how does this apply to interventions in your environment? When you’re choosing a replacement behavior, you should try to make it require less response effort than the undesirable behavior. Here are a couple of examples:

  • Every time you teach a math lesson, your learner breaks his pencil and throws it across the room. You’ve identified that the behavior of breaking the pencil functions as escape, meaning that in the past, when he broke his pencil, his consequence was a break, a walk to “calm down,” or a trip to see the dean. You’ve provided a replacement behavior of holding up a stop sign that stays on his desk. When he holds up the stop sign, he is provided with a break. Holding up the stop sign requires much less response effort than breaking a pencil.
  • You are the director of a center for learners with autism. Many of your students are being toilet trained during the day. It is important that the providers working with the students wear gloves during the toilet training process. The gloves are on the wall when you enter the bathroom, but you’ve noticed that several providers are still not wearing gloves. One provider tells you that if she forgets to grab the gloves as she’s coming in and the child is already in the stall, it’s too difficult to backtrack and keep an eye on the child. You decrease the response effort by placing a box of gloves inside each stall in the bathroom.

Decreasing the response effort for the desired behavior while simultaneously increasing the response effort for the undesirable behavior can produce even better results. There have been several studies related to increasing response effort for self-injurious behavior such as hand-biting while providing replacement behaviors with a lower response effort.

As you’re developing behavior intervention plans or thinking of ways to improve your teaching environment, you should think through the possibilities of using response effort to encourage appropriate behaviors.



Tip of the Week: How to Implement a Successful Behavioral Intervention









Tip of the Week: Choose When to Battle

Instead of choosing your battles, choose when to battle.

Recently at a workshop I was providing, a parent shared a difficult behavior that her 8 year old son with autism was exhibiting. When it was time to play with trains, he wanted a specific train. He would scream and cry until his mom found the specific train he wanted, and sometimes she was unable to find it at all. The screaming often lasted 30-60 minutes. She said this frequent behavior was stressful for both her, her son, and her other two children.

My suggestion to her was to tell her son “wait quietly,” and that she not search for the train while he was screaming or crying. As long as he was quiet, she would search, but when he started screaming or crying she would stop searching. We talked about the importance of just asking one time to “wait quietly,” and whether or not her son would benefit from a textual prompt (such as a paper that said “Wait quietly. I’m looking.”) As we discussed this, the parent said, “I just know I can’t do that all the time. I have to pick my battles.”

It’s important to note here that I have very different expectations for teachers and parents when it comes to implementing interventions. A teacher’s sole purpose when they’re with your child is to teach in a way to meet their unique needs. Teachers should be implementing an intervention 100% of the time.

Parents, on the other hand, are in a very different situation. Parents are frequently trying to implement the intervention while also cooking dinner, answering the phone, taking care of other children, etc. Unless the intervention is addressing a dangerous behavior, I don’t expect parents to be implementing the intervention 100% of the time. It’s unrealistic given the different environment the parent is working within.

But I’m not letting parents off the hook! Let’s go back to the example from the workshop.

My response to this parent was that picking your battles doesn’t necessarily mean choosing to address other, less stressful behaviors instead of this behavior. Instead of picking your battles, think of it as picking when to battle. For this parent, she would direct her son to “Wait quietly” when she knew she was ready to implement the intervention. When she knew she wouldn’t be able to implement the intervention (because she was excessively tired or she had the other two siblings with her and no other adult support) she would not say “Wait quietly.”

This may seem a bit silly at first, but over time, the child learns that when mom says “Wait quietly,” she means it. I also suggested that the first time she tries it, she should set herself up for success. Have her mother babysit the other two children, have a therapist or teacher come provide support or coaching if possible, and make sure she has enough time to follow through on implementing the intervention successfully the first time. While it takes some time and planning, the long term benefits can be powerful for the whole family.

I do not know if this particular parent tried out any of my suggestions after the workshop, but I have used this strategy with many other parents over the years. Two things tend to happen. One: the child figures out the parent means what he/she says. Two: As the child learns this and the parent experiences success, the parent uses the intervention more frequently creating a calmer, less stressful environment for both parents and children.