What skills can be taught using the principles of Applied Behavior Analysis?
ABA uses many different teaching strategies to increase and maintain desirable behaviors, teach new skills, and generalize behaviors to new environments or situations. Beginning with very young children in early intervention programs, ABA can be extremely effective in teaching early learning skills, starting with functional communication. Everyone needs an effective, efficient way to request things they want and need, whether it is through speech, sign language, picture communication systems, or a more complex augmentative or alternative communication system. Other early learning skills that are the building blocks for more complex skills include imitation, receptive direction following, compliance, and joint attention. Imitation is important to target because the ability to imitate is a critical prerequisite for more complex learning. Recent research shows that children who learn to engage in joint or shared attention do better in terms of improving IQ scores and developing functional
