Positive Motivational Strategies for Children with Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities.

This paper explains the brief stimulus preference procedure (SPA), which is designed to identify efficiently the effective reinforcers for children with autism and other developmental disabilities. SPA involves presenting the child with four items he/she generally responds well to plus one new item. After allowing the child to pick his preferred item and briefly interact with it, the preferred item is removed and the child is asked to choose from the remaining items. The process is repeated until all items have been chosen. This allows for ranking of potential reinforcers. The paper offers suggestions for how many times to run the procedure, how to rank items, how to interpret the results, and when to run the procedure. A blank data sheet is attached. (DB)