What is ABA Therapy?
ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) Therapy is the MOST EFFECTIVE evidence based therapy for children with Autism.
Children that are developing in a typical manner learn without the need for any significant intervention. Instead, the world that surrounds them offers the right setup and condition for them to learn social skills, play, and language. However, children suffering from autism learn in a much slower and less easy manner from their natural surroundings. They have the potential needed to develop skills related to learning, but they need a much more structured environment, which offers the conditions that are specially optimized for the process of acquiring these skills that other children without autism learn in a “natural manner”. ABA represents the knowledge needed to set up these special environments that will enable kids with autism to learn successfully.
Behavior Analysis main focus is the principles which provide an explanation how a particular learning process takes place. For example, positive reinforcement represents one principle from this group. This process states that when certain behavior is followed by some form of a reward, the same behavior has a greater chance of being repeated in the future.
Applied means that interventions are geared toward achieving socially-important goals, helping people be more successful in natural settings such as homes, schools, and communities.
Behavioral means that ABA focuses on what people say or do, rather than interpretations or assumptions about behavior.
And analytic means that assessments are used to identify relationships between behavior and aspects of the environment (e.g., screaming occurs most when Johnny is given a difficult task and allows him to delay or avoid that activity) before proceeding to intervention.
Behavior Analysis represents a field of scientific study that examines behavior. ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) is a process of application of the same principles of motivation and learning that are derived from Behavior Analysis, but also the technology and the procedures that come with these ideas. These processes are undertaken to provide solutions to the problems that are of a social significance.
