Autism Society records most keynote and concurrent sessions at their annual conferences. You can see and hear those recordings by purchasing full online access, or individual recordings.
Along with the drastic increase in ASD prevalence, No Child Left Behind calls for scientifically based practices; therefore, obligating educators to implement proven and effective behavioral interventions when seeking to reduce challenging behaviors in the classroom setting (Odom et al., 2005; Simpson, 2005). Literature discusses the need for schools to incorporate reinforcement-based behavioral strategies into classrooms servicing children with ASD (Lerman et al., 2004). While reinforcement and punishment procedures both influence the decrease of challenging behaviors, Differential Reinforcement of Other behavior (DRO) has been found to provide a reinforcement-based alternative to punitive behavioral approaches (Poling & Ryan, 1982).
Practitioners in the field of special education have been criticized for using punishment procedures when working among children with disabilities. Although punishment procedures have been successful in decreasing behaviors, ethics have been questioned as interventions may be interpreted as excessively aversive and intrusive. Researchers assert that reinforcement-based interventions are best practice. Educational teams should place emphasis on using Positive Behavior Supports (PBS) and reinforcement-based strategies prior to considering punitive procedures (OSEP Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports et al., 2000). The DRO intervention follows OSEP’s guidelines because it is an evidence-based reinforcement strategy that has been shown to be effective among children with autism (Gongola, 2008) and is reported to be a feasible approach for busy practitioners in school settings.
This poster will discuss a user-friendly framework for DRO and will offer a rationale for choosing and applying this intervention when working to improve student behavior. With DRO, reinforcement is delivered contingent on the absence of undesirable behaviors for a set interval of time. If the challenging behavior does not occur during this time, then reinforcement is delivered. Differential reinforcement procedures have been found to maintain the momentum of instruction, rather than interrupting activities (Cowdery et al., 1990), which is important considering that educators must intervene in behaviors while continuing to provide academic instruction. Additionally, DRO has no reported side-effects and contains many qualities that support best practices when working among students with ASD.
This poster will describe DRO as an evidence- and reinforcement-based intervention that ignores challenging behaviors while reinforcing other, more acceptable behaviors. The presentation will put forward scenarios to allow practitioners to understand the scope and sequence of the intervention and then take away a step-by-step framework for immediate implementation in the classroom setting. The poster will define the importance of conducting a functional behavior assessment, carefully defining the target behavior, calculating the interval of reinforcement using data and using the whole-interval DRO technique to decrease challenging behaviors. User-friendly procedural variations of DRO will be offered, such as whole-interval application, interval reset and weekly averages of inter-response times. The DRO case examples, checklists and visual charts included in the presentation will offer step-by-step support to practitioners in search of a feasible and structured intervention for students with ASD and challenging behaviors. The DRO intervention offers a rule-based and predictable option that allows students to quickly learn the system, resulting in expedited, positive behavior change.