What is ABA?

ABA is the design, implementation, and evaluation of environmental modifications, using behavioral stimuli and consequences, to produce socially significant improvement in human behavior, including the use of direct observation, measurement, and functional analysis of the relationship between environment and behavior.

ABA is a therapeutic approach in understanding the relationship between learning how behavior works and real situations in the environment. Behavioral analysis helps us to understand:

• How behavior works.
• How behavior is affected by the environment.
• How learning takes place.

Applied: focuses on the social significance of the behavior studied.  

Behavioral: ABA is pragmatic; it asks how it is possible to get an individual to do something effectively. 

Analytic: Behavior analysis is successful when the analyst understands and can manipulate the events that control a target behavior. 

Technological: The description of analytic research must be clear and detailed, so that any competent researcher can repeat it accurately.

Conceptually Systematic: Behavior analysis should not simply produce a list of effective interventions.

Effective: Though analytic methods should be theoretically grounded, they must be effective. Interventions also must be relevant to the client and/or culture.

Generality: Behavior analysts should aim for interventions that are generally applicable; the methods should work in different environments, apply to more than one specific behavior, and have long-lasting effects.

The goal of ABA services is to increase behaviors that are useful and decrease behaviors that are harmful and affect learning. 

Child who starts ABA therapy in childhood has the potential to make significant improvements and emphasizes that ABA therapy is most effective the earlier it begins. Access to inclusive educational settings in a mainstream classroom is among the significant long term gains made by children who received early access to ABA therapy.