Question 8:
What is incidental teaching?

My Answer:
Incidental teaching is a precise procedure that builds off of discrete trial teaching and mand training. If you recall, discrete trial training is a potentially five-part unit of instruction consisting of:

1. the discriminative stimulus (i.e., what the instructor says or does)
2. a prompt (i.e., any help the instructor gives to the child)
3. a response (i.e., what the child does)
4. a consequence (i.e., whether or not the response is reinforced)
5. an inter-trial pause (i.e., the few seconds before the next discriminative stimulus is presented).

Mand training is a potentially four-part unit of instruction consisting of:

1. establishing operations (i.e., environment is created in which objects become valuable)
2. a prompt (i.e., any help the instructor gives to the child)
3. a behavior (i.e., what the child does)
4. a consequence (i.e., whether or not the behavior is reinforced)

Incidental teaching is not the same as mand training. Incidental teaching can include mand training, discrete trial teaching, or both. In incidental teaching, mand training or discrete trial teaching are implemented in a specific way. That specific way is as follows:

One of my favorite ABA comments is the following, "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to implement ABA therapy...It's much more difficult than that!" Rocket scientists get to work with numbers and formulas that stay constant. 2+2 always equals 4. Behavior therapists get to work with children whose attitudes and desires vary from day to day. The rewards and prompts a child needs today may not be the same rewards and prompts he needs tomorrow, let alone a month from now. Still, like any science, I've found some basic guidelines that I return to frequently when behavioral treatment isn't going as well as planned.

Let’s stop mentioning errorless learning when comparing different behavioral treatments for children with autism. The discussion, as currently framed, isn’t really helpful.

In the late 90’s, the term “errorless learning” started to appear in discussions of behavioral treatment for children with autism. Unfortunately, rather than contributing to the dialogue on effective treatment, the use of the term simply caused confusion. Upon closer scrutiny, it turns out errorless learning has been a part of behavioral treatment for children with autism for a long time. The only thing new in the 90’s was calling it “errorless learning.”

Ever since the 1987 Lovaas study, a lot of attention has been paid to the way in which behavioral treatment occurs in a 1:1 setting. Ongoing research is helping us recognize which procedures or guidelines are helpful when teaching a particular skill or teaching a child with particular characteristics. However, all of this attention on behavioral treatment in a 1:1 setting has made it easy to forget that Dr. Lovaas’ behavioral treatment program was not simply 1:1 treatment. That’s one of the reasons I reject labeling Dr. Lovaas’ work as synonymous with Discrete Trial Teaching. In both the 1987 study and replication studies of 2005 and 2006, the treatment progressed to include play dates with peers and time in school. These interactions were carefully planned, were initially facilitated by a trained aide, and included systematic progression that required just as much time and effort as the 1:1 treatment. It is unfortunate when a behavioral treatment program places all of its emphasis on the 1:1 treatment component while ignoring the importance of these other critical elements of treatment.