NATURALISTIC TEACHING

While interventions such as Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and the Lovaas program have proved effective as interventions for Autism Spectrum Disorders, new types of behavioral interventions are emerging in response to criticisms of these models. Critics believe that the rote learning involved in ABA often does not result in generalized learning i.e. the child may not apply the skills learned in one context to another context.

Naturalistic teaching aims to emphasize the physical and social contexts in which learning occurs, what is motivating for the child, and what the child is most likely to want to communicate about. Some naturalistic teaching methods include:

• Pivotal Response Training

• Incidental teaching

• Natural Language Teaching Paradigm.

These approaches aim for a more natural approach to supporting language and communication development for children with Autism, Asperger's syndrome or other developmental disorders. The child becomes the focal point of social interactions and has more control over preferred activities and topics of conversation.

Providing choices for the child increase the motivation to learn and provide opportunities to learn from the consequences of their choices. Naturalistic teaching allows the generalization of skills acquired as learning occurs in a variety of natural environments.

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This autism fact sheet is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation. It is derivative of an Autism and Asperger's syndrome-related articles at http://en.wikipedia.org