Discusses considerations that should be made when one chooses an intervention based on aspects of the student, the situation, and the intervention itself. Considers manipulation that involves reinforcing events and nonpreferred events. (RJC)

This article on the use of applied behavior analysis with students who have autism focuses on selected recently developed stimulus control techniques. These include new methods for teaching conditional discrimination (matching) skills, stimulus equivalence procedures, prompt and prompt-fading techniques, and incidental teaching procedures.…

This guide outlines a series of instructional strategies that have proven to be successful in educating children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). These techniques have also been found useful with all children. Three major components of a successful strategy for educating children with ADHD are academic instruction, behavioral…

Guidelines are offered for dealing with noncompliant behavior in severely handicapped students. Eight steps in developing interventions for such behaviors are listed, and three are dealt with in detail: defining noncompliance, establishing causes for non compliance, and providing a number of interventions for each cause. Noncompliance is viewed…

Timeout, a widely used approach with severely handicapped and deaf blind students, is nevertheless potentially aversive and should not become a routine procedure. The decision to employ timeout from positive reinforcement should be based on careful consideration of the child's behavior, the severity of the target behavior, and the need for…

There is a need when working with mentally handicapped people to develop interventions that can be used within a self-control framework. One intervention that has demonstrated success in a self-control context with normally intelligent people is Cognitive Stress Inoculation Training (CSIT). In CSIT clients are taught to recognize current self-talk…

The paper explores three reasons for low use by teachers of behavior modification: (1) differences in assumptions concerning causality, (2) attributions of responsibility, and (3) problems in modifying the working knowledge of teachers. The implications of these issues are discussed in terms of how consultants might increase the impact of…

Parents and teachers can cooperate by requiring that behavior problem children successfully complete an activity of low priority (nonpreferred) to them before participating in a high priority (preferred) one. The daily report approach documents the way in which school behavior can be linked to access to home or community activities. (CL)

This manual takes school practitioners step by step through conducting functional behavioral assessments and using them to plan effective interventions. The authors present a cogent rationale for the use of functional behavioral assessment (FBA), clearly explaining its advantages over traditional approaches to dealing with problem behavior. Basic…

The paper stresses that, in teaching language handicapped children, the natural reinforcement of language as means of communication, of obtaining wants, is of more value than reinforcers (such as candy) often used in clinical settings. (PHR)

The article suggests and describes several ways in which social validation procedures can be employed by researchers and educators to help them select when and how much to modify target behaviors of students. (DLS)

This article on the use of applied behavior analysis with students who have autism focuses on the management of the physical and temporal environments to highlight salient stimuli and support the direct teaching and shaping of appropriate behavior. It stresses the use of systematic instruction including errorless learning, data-based…

This paper first reviews four classes of habit disorders in children: motor and vocal tics, nervous habits, stuttering, and Tourette's disorder. It then describes the habit reversal procedure and reviews the literature on its use and variations to treat each of the four classes of habit disorders. Emphasis is on simplified versions of the original…

The paper describes interventions which can be used by parents of infants or toddlers with feeding problems. General considerations center on the critical nature of food intake, the importance of controlling events associated with feeding, and the reinforcing nature of certain adults. The paper suggests the need for selecting interventions which…

The report summarizes findings from an investigation of response interrelationships in severely handicapped children with behavior problems in order to provide empirical guidelines for determining intervention priorities. A state-wide sample of severely handicapped, behavior problem children (2-8 years old) was observed longitudinally in their…