More Misconceptions about ABA

I recently attended a lecture series that had invited a Child Development Psychologist to be its speaker. There were two parts to this lecture. A morning session that was a presentation to a large group and an afternoon session geared for a select smaller group

 

This presenter’s topic for the day was about Autism Treatment. I had thought, okay, perhaps a good review. I also encouraged my BCBA students that I supervise to attend.

 

Unfortunately, the morning session at times, bashed ABA. My BCBA students were quite appalled at the lack of understanding this Developmental psychologist had regarding Applied Behavior Analysis. My students came to me and asked, “how could she bash ABA like that ?  She mentioned interventions but did not credit ABA principles. ABA is not just about the Lovaas Method. Us ABA professionals implement a lot of the strategies that were presented.”  Yes indeed, us ABA professionals do. My students even started to talk about how some of the strategies presented should be evaluated first for effectiveness and perhaps would need to be adjusted according to the client and their environment.  All I had to say was, very good my ABA Students!  During the presentation, one of my graduated ABA BCBA students was sitting with me and she kept saying, “No that is not right, I disagree with this speaker.”  I just nodded my head in agreement.

 

Given that I am a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, I am bound ethically to educate others about ABA. So on the feedback eval form for this speaker I wrote the following;

 

Not ALL ABA professionals are robotic/high structured ABA technologists. Some ABA professionals actually are innovative, try to create teaching opportunities, use natural environment teaching and believe in increasing functional skills. Please do not stereotype ALL ABA professionals. Thank you, Board Certified Behavior Analyst 

 

Lucky me,  I had been selected to attend the afternoon special session. I was not looking forward to it at all. I ate lunch with my current BCBA students as they all tried to rally me up to sit through another bashing ABA session. You did not need to be a behavior professional in order to predict its outcome.

 

So, I went up to sit in on the afternoon session. Since Board Certified Behavior Analysts are still quite rare ( approx. 5,000 in the world) , I said to myself,  it is important to represent our field. So as individuals were introducing themselves and their credentials, I was the last one. I announced that I was a Board Certified Behavior Analyst with confidence.  So, one may think that the Psychologist presenter would be more careful in how they spoke about ABA, but not so.

 

She basically summed up our ABA field as being teaching skills and then providing a M&M candy as a reward. The bashing continued i.e. as to how RDI, Floortime and the TEACCH program had more to offer than ABA. I just kept shaking my head and thinking what misconceptions.

 

True, some ABA professionals just do discrete trials, but NOT all. RDI, Floortime and TEACCH all have ABA principles that ABA professionals do utilize and implement. Behavior Analysts do use motivational systems, Token economies, teach functional skills, work on social / interactive and play skills, implement picture schedules etc etc. Not all ABA professionals can do everything; however, there are ABA professionals that are trained and experienced to do other things besides distributing M&Ms.

 

Additionally, the presenter then was show casing her Autism diagnostic checklist as an innovative new tool, which by the way was not impressive. It basically had some of the same questions from the leading Autism checklists like ADI-R, CARS, GARS, ADOS etc. How do I know this? Well because my graduate research paper was on Autism Diagnostic Tools at UMDNJ.

 

She continued on to say how the learning/behavior strategies were so important from the other disciplines and said again that they were probably not done by ABA professionals. At that point I left the room.

 

My concern was that ABA was being depicted in a very incorrect manner. ABA is much more involved than just teaching things with M&Ms.  In particular, there was a producer from the Discovery Channel who had announced to the group that she was doing 2 documentaries about Autism. So I utilized my time wisely during my absence from the afternoon presentation and found the producer. I spoke to her about ABA, encouraged her to look at my website and other informational sites about Applied Behavior Analysis. ABA is not just discrete trials and giving out M&Ms candy.

 

Now do I think that ALL Child Development Psychologists are no good?  No, not at all, it depends upon the individual, their integrity, training and experience.

 

 

 

 

Tags: ABA students, BCBA supervision, Child Development, Floortime, Psychologist, RDI, TEACCH