In-Home Observation

The alternative site that I observed was an in-home program for children with autism. The child I observed was a 4-year-old boy with moderate autism and was mostly nonverbal. The program was privately owned by a woman who had her Ph.D. in Applied Behavior Analysis. The therapist who worked one-on-one with the student was in the process of receiving her Ph.D. in Applied Behavior Analysis. The parents paid $120 per hour for these services, but I think they received some financial aid through the government . The process began with both therapists interviewing the mother and observing the child to create an individualized plan to meet the needs of the child. Then the therapist who primarily worked with the child met with the family to provide …show more content…
At BRAAC team meetings occurred once every two weeks for each student, where IEPs were reviewed and behavioral plans were created and tweaked in order to ensure that students were meeting their educational goals and responding well to strategies to eliminate challenging behaviors. While BRAAC had a more team-like approach to these meetings, a similar meeting occurred at the alternative site, but instead of meeting once every two weeks, they only met once during my three-week observation. However, both meetings at the two sites discussed essentially the same topics: IEP goals and challenging behaviors. Furthermore, both sites had fairly similar end goals for their students. At BRAAC the main objective was to get the students ready to attend public school, and at the alternative site, the main goal was to get the child ready for Kindergarten. Some of the students at BRAAC were probably going to be too old to go back to public school by the time they were ready, so once they turn 21 (oldest they can be at BRAAC), those students would hopefully have acquired a skill set they could use at a job. Since the child at my alternative site was so young, this transition plan was not something they were considering yet, hoping that he would eventually be successful in a public school …show more content…
Unfortunately, the youngest student at BRAAC (he was six) would have been the perfect comparison between these two sites because of the closeness in age, but there were issues with his school system so he was unable to attend BRAAC during my two-week observation. However, I was able to look through the materials they used when working with him and the majority of them were the same. For example, his classroom is mostly filled with toys, which makes sense because young children learn through play. Similar at the alternative site, the majority of the teaching trials took place through playing. The majority of the therapy were manding sessions, where the child had to verbally ask for toys. However, tacting was also sometimes incorporated during these sessions as the child would sometimes repeat the labels the therapist used for the toys. This was rare, however, because the child had an extremely limited vocabulary (under 10 words). An interesting difference between BRAAC and the alternative site was the use of sign language. At BRAAC none of the therapists were fluent in sign language, but they did have pictures of signs for common mands and objects. So these visual cues could teach both the student and the therapists. At the alternative site, sign language was not used at all, which surprised me due to the child’s limited vocabulary. So if they tacted an object that the student could not say, they