A study co-authored by Lynn Koegel, Clinic Director of the Koegel Autism Center at UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School, offers findings that contribute to the overall body of literature supporting Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT)--a naturalistic intervention developed at the Koegel Autism Center for remediating core symptoms of autism. Appearing in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, the paper, co-authored with Fereshteh Mohammadzaheri and Mohammad Rezaee, from the Hamadan University of Medical Sciences and Health Services, Hamadan, Iran, and Seyeed Majid Rafiee from the Institute for Cognitive Science Studies, Teheran, Iran, is entitled “A Randomized Clinical Trial Comparison Between Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT) and Structured Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) Intervention for Children with Autism.” (The article may be read online at the Springer Publishing site.)
Thirty children diagnosed with autism, 18 boys and 12 girls, ranging in age from 6 to 11 years, participated in this study. The children were randomly paired and assigned to either a group where they were treated with traditional applied behavior analysis (ABA) methods or with pivotal response treatment. After three months of intervention, the data showed that the PRT approach was significantly more effective in improving targeted and untargeted areas. The children in the PRT group saw greater gains in social communication skills, as well as overall gains in pragmatic skills, including inappropriate initiation, coherence, stereotyped language, use of context, and rapport.
“With large numbers of children being diagnosed with autism, intervention procedures that are more efficient are both time and cost effective,” the paper concludes. “As well, procedures that speed up the habilitation process are important for children with ASD [Autism Spectrum Disorders], particularly if they produce widespread gains beyond the specific treatment goals.”
Lynn Kern Koegel, Ph.D., is the Clinical Director of the Koegel Autism Center at UC Santa Barbara. She has been active in the development of programs to improve communication in children with autism, including the development of first words, development of grammatical structures, and pragmatics. Dr. Koegel is co-author and co-editor of major textbooks on autism and positive behavioral support and is co-author of the bestselling book Overcoming Autism: Finding the Answers, Strategies, and Hope That Can Transform a Child’s Life (Penguin, 2014, second edition). In addition to her published books and articles in the area of communication and language development, she has developed and published procedures and field manuals in the area of self-management and functional analysis that are used in school districts throughout the United States and have been translated in most major languages used throughout the world. Dr. Lynn Koegel is actively involved in providing support and intervention services in school districts, both locally in California and throughout the United States. Dr. Koegel and her husband Robert were awarded the first annual recipient of the Sesame Street Children’s Television Workshop Award for brightening the lives of children. She has also been featured in news reports on television stations throughout the United States and has appeared on episodes of the internationally broadcast ABC television series Supernanny.