About the presentation:
Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention (EIBI) is the implementation of behavioral intervention with young children during the first several years of life. EIBI is often provided for children with autism ranging in age from 1 to 5 years of age in home-based or community (i.e., childcare) settings. Several factors present unique considerations related to service delivery for children receiving EIBI. For example, families with children entering EIBI have often received fairly recent news of their child’s diagnosis. As a result, EIBI is often the family’s first exposure to autism and behavior analytic intervention, placing clinicians in the position of both building rapport with and educating families who are in the initial stages of processing a diagnosis, are managing stressors related to having a child with autism, and who may enter intervention with misconceptions related to ABA and autism. Additionally, behavior analysts working with young children are also often responsible for establishing foundational “learning-to-learn” skills that facilitate learning and set the occasion for
more complex repertoires. Direct care staff are often asked to teach these skills in the context of play and to utilize natural environment teaching (NET) techniques during daily routines, both of which require a level of fluency with these strategies in order to take advantage of multiple learning opportunities while maintaining the child’s interest and attention. Lastly, behavior analysts delivering EIBI are tasked with collaborating with families on the identification of skills that may decrease or prevent the development of severe topographies of challenging behavior while acknowledging that young children often engage in developmentally- and socially-appropriate forms of challenging behavior. This presentation will discuss these and other considerations related to the delivery of EIBI in naturalistic settings.
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will be able to describe three considerations related to the implementation of EIBI with families with a young child with autism
- Participants will be able to identify considerations for promoting caregiver implementation of and participation in behavioral intervention
- Participants will be able to describe the benefits of natural environment teaching (NET) strategies in the implementation of EIBI and the challenges of effectively training direct care staff to implement NET
- Participants will be able identify foundational learning-to-learning skills that targeted in EIBI and how they relate to more complex behavioral repertoires
About the presenter:
Dr. Pamela Peterson is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst and licensed applied behavior analyst specializing in early intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) for young children with autism. Dr. Peterson has been working in the field of ABA with a focus on EIBI for over 12 years and is currently the director of early intervention at Melmark New England. She received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University and her masters and doctorate degrees in Behavior Analysis through Western New England University. Dr. Peterson has co-authored book chapters on common components of EIBI as well as a peer-reviewed article on the establishment of social referencing in
young children with autism in the presence of safe and dangerous stimuli. She currently services as an adjunct lecturer for Regis College and Western New England University. Her current research interests include the emergence and maintenance of complex social repertoires such as imitation, joint attention, social referencing, and observational learning; the implementation of incidental teaching strategies by providers and caregivers; and the evaluation of outcomes of early intensive behavioral intervention for children and their families.