MAP uses behavior analytic principles to teach skills and behaviors necessary to function in home, school, and community situations.  Teaching is conducted both in a structured setting and within the natural environment.  

Discrete Trial Teaching.  DTT breaks concepts into their smallest possible parts and teaches each part separately before putting all the mastered parts back together to demonstrate the concept.  DTT begins teaching in an environment with reduced stimuli, very simple instructions and high repetition.  This better enables the child with autism to understand the surrounding typical environment and process simple visual and auditory instructions.  High repetition and breaking skills down ensures the highest success rate for a child with autism in the teaching situation. 

Reinforcement.  Reinforcement is a consequence (a stimulus that follows behavior) which increases the likelihood a behavior will occur again in the future.  MAP utilizes both positive (adding something after the behavior) and negative (removing something after the behavior) reinforcement for the acquisition of skills and to increase and shape desired, socially acceptable behavior.  Pairing is used to associate highly preferred stimuli with the learning environment to develop rapport between the child and the teaching team for optimal learning.  Over time, reinforcement fades from tangible items to more natural reinforcement such as social interaction and verbal praise, similar to what will be delivered in a classroom environment.  

Functional Communication.  MAP staff will assess which form of functional communication is most appropriate for the child.  The purpose of functional communication is for any child, of any ability, to be able to communicate their needs and gain access to stimuli within their environment, even if this does not involve vocal language.  The child’s communication repertoire will be targeted by finding motivating stimuli and prompting the child to emit a functional communication response to access the desired stimuli.  

Behavior Reduction.  Maladaptive behaviors are reduced by utilizing differential reinforcement procedures and teaching replacement skills.  Functional behavior assessments are conducted to not only identify what the behavior looks like but also evaluate maintaining variables.  With this information, an individualized  intervention plan can be designed and implemented across environments.    

Generalization. Once concepts are mastered in a structured setting, these concepts are targeted for generalization in the natural environment.  In generalization the focus is to change the delivery of instructions, the materials used, and the responses required to mimic ways that these skills may be needed in the natural environment.  Generalization of skills is very important as this allows us to ensure that learned skills will be functional to the child in all environments.

Prompting. Prompts are any assistance given to achieve a desired response.  There are a variety of types of prompts (gesture, model, verbal, physical) with varying degrees of intrusiveness.  It is common for more intrusive, higher level prompts to be used when first teaching new skills with the goal of fading the prompts as the child becomes more independent with the skills through errorless learning.  Once a skill has been acquired, least to most intrusive prompting is followed to allow the child the opportunity to perform the response with the least assistance necessary before increasing to reach a successful prompt.  Reinforcement is always provided immediately after a prompt to increase the desired response.