2011-12-11

Supposedly Funny Video is a Disservice to Families Looking for Information About Autism Treatment

The decisions of how to proceed to help a child after a diagnosis of autism is a very difficult one. Imagine the most difficult decision you could ever make, which could determine the future of your child. Can you imagine a more important and difficult decision? This time can be anguishing and families need to count with serious professionals to help.

Today a tweet made me realize that this video is still up and has been watched over 16,000 times. That is an incredible amount of disservice. Maybe it would be a funny internal joke. But it is not internal, it has been offered to the world on You Tube by that who should be figuring out the best way to present families with informed choices about treatment options, a service provider.

The Association for Science for Autism Treatment has responded with an

Open Letter to Son-Rise Program's Raun Kaufman

DTT Manual on Facebook

Discrete Trials Teaching with Children with Autism – A Self-Instructional Manual is the joint effort of Drs. Daniela Fazzio, PhD, BCBA-D and Garry L. Martin, PhD, to contribute to the continuously growing field of early intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) for children with autism. With the growing numbers of children diagnosed and of the availability of programs and practitioners using applied behavior analysis to teach them, comes a substantial need for effective training strategies to bring interventionists and educators up to speed. Discrete Trials Teaching (DTT) is one of the main instructional strategies used in EIBI and a good DTT package will require good instructional material and qualified professionals to supervise implementation. The DTT Manual provides the instructional material and the structure for mastery of the components of this DTT package; the manual has been extensively researched with good results on accuracy of DTT implementation in the training setting and generalization with actual children with autism.