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Numerous behavior analytic methods developed since the early 1960s have proved effective for developing a wide range of skills in learners with autism. Recent advances in stimulus control technology, in particular, offer effective methods for teaching many important skills and for promoting independent, generalized performances. This article reviews selected stimulus control techniques, including new methods for teaching conditional discrimination (matching) skills, stimulus equivalence procedures, prompt and prompt-fading techniques, and incidental teaching procedures.
In 1948 an event occurred that was to have far-reaching effects: Sidney Bijou became director of the Institote of Child Development at the University of Washington. Bijou was a Columbia University-trained psychologist with a strong interest in child development, learning theory, and the relatively new radical behaviorism of B. F. Skinner, with whom he had worked for 2 years at Indiana University. Shortly after Bijou went to the University of Washington, a research program was established within the Institute of Child Development to study normal and abnormal behavior in young children in a laboratory and in an experimental school. There Bijou and his colleagues and students blended Skinner's natural science approach to behavior-- including methods of functionally analyzing individual behavior-with research on child development. Over the next two decades they conducted landmark studies of operant behavior in young children and pioneered numerous methods for managing problem behavior, teaching academic skills to students with mental retardation, training parents to work as therapists with their own children, and conducting research in natural settings. In 1961 Bijou and Donald M. Baer published their classic text Child Development: A Systematic and Empirical Theory, in which they examined development from a behavioral perspective (Bijou, 1996).
How is this history relevant to the topic at hand? Some researchers might be surprised to learn that much of the seminal research on behavior analytic methods for teaching children with autism was conducted at the University of Washington Institute for Child Development under Bijou's direction. In the early 1960s a local physician asked Bijou if the staff at the institute might be able to teach a visually impaired boy with autism to wear glasses. Dicky, then 3 1/2 years old, exhibited severe tantrums; self-injurious behavior; problems with sleeping and eating; and very limited communication, social, and self-care skills. Bijou had seen...