Intensive Behavioural Intervention for kids with special needs

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Intensive Behavioral Intervention (IBI) is an evidence-based practice designed to improve core learning skills in areas of language, cognitive, and social development. Aarian started a clinic-based IBI program in September of 2012 around 7 years of age. He used to attend school 2 days a week during this program. The program included a team of instructor therapists working with Aarian supervised by Senior therapist for up to 30 hours per week. A clinical supervisor was responsible for overseeing the development of the child's curriculum and monitoring the overall progress.

VB-Mapp assessment was conducted for Aarian and a program was put in place with the following goals.

Aarian will increase the scope of his manding which is also requesting for his desired items and activities using PECS book. A total of two 20 minutes sessions per day were run in order to introduce Aarian to a variety of new stimuli in order to identify new reinforcers.

In addition to manding for desired items a program was also put in place to mand or request for missing items. He was also taught to mand for his peers during social skills activities and lunchtime.

The second goal was for Aarian to complete an Independent Activity Schedule without any prompts from the therapist. A pretend play skills program was also a part of his goals in order to teach him to play with various toys in a functional way like a ball, slinky, Mr. Potato Head as they were intended to play with.

To increase his frequency of vocalizations the instructors used to encourage Aarian to pair each symbol from his PECS book with a vocalization. The last goal was to work on listener responding wherein Aarian had to scan for the correct item or picture from an array of 6 when instructed to pick up an item. A generalization and maintenance program was put in place to maintain the mastered skills.

Aarian's overall score on the VB-MAPP  Assessment fell in Level 1 range with some skills stronger than others. I will discuss in detail about the results of the VB-MAPP   assessment in each domain in a future blog post. In the past when Aarian got diagnosed with Autism at age 3 we started the ABA program for Aarian. Once Aarian started the IBI  program we saw gains that Aarian made in his overall development.

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