Technical Review of Published Research on Applied Behaviour Analysis Interventions for People with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Results 11. Evidence for Effects of Behaviour Analytic Methods across Ministry of Education Target Behaviour Classifications

This section summarises the evidence concerning behaviour analytic methods for changing behaviours and teaching new skills.

All of the various behaviour analytic intervention types were found to have some measure of scientific support for their effectiveness. The NSP review classifies these methods into 16 intervention types (Table 2) and reports strong scientific evidence for nine and emerging evidence for the remaining seven of these.

It should be noted that although Reductive Packages were classified as having emerging support it is becoming less and less frequent to find such strategies used alone. If they are used then other strategies that promote positive behaviour change would normally be used alongside them. Thus “emerging” might not be the appropriate term to use for these.

The intervention types included in the review cover a wide breadth of behaviour analytic methodology.To illustrate at least some of the behavioural methods a practitioner should know about and should be able to use in order to adopt evidence-based practice, the New Zealand data were examined in more detail.

Interventions with a score or of 2 or more on the SMRS were selected and sorted according to the degree of support for that intervention (strong support for beneficial effects, limited support, unknown, does not support). The reviewers’ descriptions of the procedures involved for those with strong support for beneficial effects were used to summarise the interventions and these are given in Table 6 below. This table illustrates the range of procedures found to be supported in this sub-set of the reviewed studies.

Table 6 shows that a wide range of behaviour analytic procedures needs to be used for evidence-base practice. It should be noted that these summary descriptions do not include mention of every behavioural principle involved in the interventions. For example, reinforcers of some type (e.g., social, tangible, tokens, and/or access to activities) are an integral part of teaching new skills and helping behaviour change but are not always listed in the summary description of the procedure. Also motivating (or establishing) operations are an important aspect of using reinforcers effectively but are also not mentioned in the summary descriptions.

Table 6 shows that effective practice requires the use of appropriate combinations of procedures and that one “intervention” frequently involves the combination of several different procedures. For example, antecedent procedures, such as the use of physical or video prompts, often form only part of an intervention and so are combined with other maintenance procedures and, when they are used, they are also normally combined with some form of reinforcement and often with a fading procedure to be maximally effective.

These examples of skills are, to a large extent, a subset of the general skills that behaviour analytic practitioners (e.g., teachers, carers) need for increasing or decreasing behaviours effectively if evidence-based practices are to be adopted. A fuller range of knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) would be expected of those training and supervising practitioners (see Behavior Analyst Certification Board Task list – 3rd ed. (2005) – www.BACB.com. Specialist extra KSAs recommended for behaviour analytic practitioners specialising with ASD populations can be found at http://www.bacb.com/Downloadfiles/AutismTaskList/708AutismTaskListF.pdf