Naturalistic Interventions are a collection of practices that include environmental arrangement, interaction tech- niques, and behavioral strategies. These practices are designed to encourage specific target behaviors based on insights into the learner’s interests, and also, to provide responses that build more elaborate learner behaviors that are naturally reinforcing and appropriate to the interaction.
Research
Naturalistic Interventions are a collection of practices that include environmental arrangement, interaction tech- niques, and behavioral strategies. These practices are designed to encourage specific target behaviors based on insights into the learner’s interests, and also, to provide responses that build more elaborate learner behav- iors that are naturally reinforcing and appropriate to the interaction. They occur within ongoing, typical activities and take advantage of student interests and motivation (McGee & Daly, 2007). Naturalistic Interventions has been recognized as an evidenced-based practice by the National Professional Development Center on Autism Disorders and the National Autism Center.
Application
Using strategies from the field of applied behavior analysis (ABA), Naturalistic Interventions present objectives within typical early childhood activities, instead of sitting face-to-face with the child at a table. Teachers arrange the environment by placing preferred toys and activities of each student within sight, but not within reach, to en- courage the student to initiate teaching sessions based on preplanned learning objectives. Once the child shows an interest in the materials by gesturing or requesting an item or activity, the teacher prompts for an elaboration on the initiation. The child subsequently obtains the desired item upon generating the elaboration. For example, a student may say, “ball,” to request a toy ball, followed by the teacher’s question, “What color ball?” When the student says, “blue ball,” she is allowed to play with the ball for a couple of minutes. A nonverbal student might work on the skill of asking for help using a gesture. For example, the teacher could place the child’s favorite toy, a plastic soldier, in a plastic container that the child could not open. Once the child attempts to open the box, the teacher physically prompts him to hand the box to her for help.
Resources
Check out our new library resources (broken link)for four of the NPDC evidenced based practices, including Naturalistic Teach- ing. Available from the T-TAC ODU Library.
References
McGee, G. G., & Daly, T. (2007). Incidental teaching of age-appropriate social phrases to children with autism. Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, 32, 112-123.
