Applications of Applied Behavior Analysis to School-Based Instructional Intervention

This chapter describes how ABA principles and strategies can be used for assessment and school-based intervention of children’s academic problems. The chapter emphasizes the importance of developing stimulus control over academic responding as the first goal of instruction, and of then developing stimulus generalization as the ultimate goal of instruction. Empirically supported instructional interventions that promote stimulus control through the basic processes of differential reinforcement, modeling, prompting, and error correction are reviewed. A useful heuristic for guiding how to change procedures as a function of progressive response strengthening is applied to assist the reader in knowing which interventions are most appropriate at any given time. The chapter concludes with a description of strategies shown to improve generalized academic responding for application across stimulus situations, and for use with more complex curricular requirements.