Rewards & Learning; the Problem with ABA

Post Reply New Topic

Saw this very interesting video today... Nobody seems to have applied this to autism yet; but I can't help but think....

I've said for a long time that rewarding kids for doing things as a part of ABA doesn't seem to work. I mean, literally doesn't work. When rewarded, as a kid, I tended to try to weasel out of doing the job because I felt forced to do it--and the more I wanted that reward, the worse it got and the harder it got.

Apparently, there has been a lot of research that corroborates this. The research had nothing to do with ABA and wasn't done on autistic people... but it does reveal a lot about drive and motivation.

BTW, if you have auditory issues like me, this video is actually well done--even though it doesn't have captions, the visual reinforces the auditory. I found it very easy to follow and very interesting.

The Surprising Realities Behind What Motivates Us

What do you think? Does this apply to educating autistic kids?

You reminded me of the paper linked here:

http://www.shutdownsandstressinautism.c ... paper.html

They tried to motivate the girl every way they could, but when they set her to do the work, she'd just shut down, rewards or no.

Oh it definately applies!

I remember encountering something like this idea many years ago before my daughter was born (so I wan't thinking about autistic kids). Friends at work (working mothers) were despairing about the "damn pizza coupons" that were destroying their kids' will to read. The schools were giving the kids book lists and once they read X number of books from the list, they were given coupons for free pizza at a local pizza place (which presumably got a tax break for their part in education). These moms complained that their kids read just enough to get pizza and not one page more. Their reading performance was actually going down because of the large (pizza) incentive.

Then JK Rowling came along and wrote a book series so compelling that kids stopped paying attention to the pizza and read for the sheer joy and being able to immerse themselves in the story. She is a hero.

The take home point I got from that (before I had a kid) was that if you try to get a kid to master a skill just so they can earn a reward (other than the reward of having that skill) they won't really get that good at it.

So then I had an autistic kid. Naturally, experts from all corners were saying that intensive ABA was her only hope of learning any skills. On the strength of one of your blog posts (!) I didn't go for that. It sounded dicey and I remembered the moms at work wailing about their kids not being good readers on account of too much pizza reward. So none of that.

But the school did attempt a little ABA-lite to try to get her to do some academics tasks. The problem was, she was reward-resistant. Jellybeans worked one day and the next she didn't care about them. They tried stickers to earn prizes, miscellaneous food treats, time allowed to play with a certain toy unbothered by teachers...nothing stuck. So they gave up on that whole approach and moved on to a different approach- the "you can do it ALL BY YOURSELF" approach. So it isn't that brain boggling that YOU CAN DO IT ALL BY YOURSELF worked so well in this corporate experiment. Autonomy really is a huge motivator, at any age. Incidentally it's what I do at home and so do lots of parents. But also lots of parents got sucked into the school's paradigm and started utilizing their earn-stickers-to-earn-treats method.

All in all, I would think autonomy would be a good sell for autistic kids. More than jellybeans, they want to be able to have skills that will make the adults stop pestering them. Or at least that works for my daughter. I don't do rewards at all. I do a ladder of skill achievement- being able to do X leads to the ability to do Y which leads to the ability to do Z. And then I pester her less, which for a kid is always a bonus.