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The World is Our Classroom: Using Community-Based Instruction to Advance Socially Significant Behavior in Students with Disabilities
Community-based instruction is sustained and repeated instruction that takes place in the community rather than in the school building (Baker & Freeman, 2014). It is a research-based practice that provides “real-life” opportunities to teach functional life skills as well as aspects of the...
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Identifying and Navigating Behavioral Strategies in IEPs: How Can These Translate to Home?
An Individualized Education Plan (IEP) can be an overwhelming document for families, especially deciphering which interventions are appropriate to use by parents in the home or community setting. An IEP is created by a multidisciplinary team, including parents and the educational team, that...
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Reverse Inclusion and the Use of Peer Buddies to Teach Social Skills in a Public School Setting
It can be challenging to meet the needs of every student within the public school setting. For many students with autism, their academic needs are best met in a self-contained, special education classroom that utilizes the principles of applied behavior analysis. However, this can be limiting in...
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Use of a Specialized PBIS Framework to Organize and Deliver Evidence-Based Practices to Children with Autism
A significant challenge facing autism service providers is the effective and consistent delivery of evidence-based practices to the children they serve. A number of research reviews, including the National Standards Project (Rue, Knox, Welchons, Murzycki, Pollack, & Class, 2015) and the...
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Understanding Dietary Distress, Forced Eating, and Food Deserts While Autistic
My name is Sylvia, and I’m an Autistic adult with sensory hypersensitivities that mainly affect my eating, which I’m choosing to call dietary hypersensitivities, or, more simply, food/drink hypersensitivities. For me, these hypersensitivities are oversensitivities based on any combination of...
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“How Was I Supposed to Know?” Navigating the Unwritten Curriculum Through Executive Functioning Supports
We are constantly navigating contexts that we may not have been explicitly guided through. Along the way, there was some experience of making sense of these unexplained rules. Even though no one specifically addressed them, you knew where the line was. This doesn’t always ring true to many...
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Improving Parent Engagement for Your Child with Autism
If you are a parent of a child with special needs, you’ve had to balance many new challenges along with those you already face on a daily basis. Lately, you may be spending more time than ever with your child, but more time doesn’t mean you’re getting more quality time. While it may not be...
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Early and Intensive Behavioral Intervention Today
In the 1970s, O. Ivar Lovaas embarked on research that would change the way we think about trajectories for young children with autism. He went on to publish a pivotal study entitled “Behavioral Treatment and Normal Education and Intellectual Functioning in Young Autistic Children,” which...
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Strategies to Teach Key Foundation Skills to Young Children with Autism
Children with autism have both strong and weak points when it comes to learning – like all children. A significant tendency to progress at different rates across developmental domains is generally the case. Further, there can exist an uneven performance within a single area. Since language is a...
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A Selective Eating Program: MEALLS Making Eating A Lifelong Learning Skill
Feeding and eating problems, such as selective eating, is common among individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The prevalence of feeding problems in children with ASD is reported to be as high as 90%, with around 70% of individuals being described as picky eaters (Twachtman-Reilly et al.,...
