What is ‘ABA’?
You may have heard of ABA. You may have even seen certain elements of ABA in place even though it may not have necessarily been called ABA. Good teachers use a variety of ABA strategies as part of their daily classroom interactions with their students. For example, many teachers provide encouragement when things are difficult, they revise tasks to enable children to be successful, they organize lesson plans to facilitate the transfer of newly learned skills and most of all they reward students with positive feedback for good performance.
The acronym ABA stands for “Applied Behavioral Analysis”. It is the science of behavior. Behavior is anything we say or do, from asking for juice, or a child telling their parent they hear an airplane, to playing on the beach. In simple terms it involves breaking down tasks into small achievable steps, each step building on the previous one.
Typically developing children can usually learn without any intervention. In other words the typical environment they are born into provides the right conditions to learn language, play and develop appropriate social skills. Most children learn from their environment at an astounding rate, completely unassisted. However, after a few years, this breaks down and they no longer learn things as naturally. They require a more structured environment to learn to read, write and do arithmetic.
Children and adults with development delays or disabilities tend to learn less from their natural environment. They are very much capable of learning but they require a more structured environment right from the start. The point of ABA is to teach the prerequisites to make it possible for a child or adult with developmental delays to learn more naturally. ABA can provide a wonderful environment to enable children to learn and can be used by parents as well as teachers to teach socially significant behaviors such as reading, academics, social skills, communication and daily living skills. Daily living skills include gross and fine motor skills, eating and food preparation, potty training, dressing, personal self care, domestic skills, time and punctuality, money and value.
This methodology is not just for children with special needs; it has been successfully used with typical children of all ages and populations. It is simply good teaching.
