Comparison of behavior analytic and eclectic early interventions for young children with autism after three years.
Three years of intensive ABA leaves preschoolers with autism twice as likely to reach normal cognitive and language scores versus eclectic care.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tracked preschoolers with autism for three years. One group got intensive behavior analytic intervention. The other got mixed eclectic services.
They checked IQ, language, and daily-living skills every year. The study was not randomized, but kids were matched for age and starting scores.
What they found
After three years, the ABA group was twice as likely to score in the normal range. Their gains held or kept growing.
The eclectic group improved too, but much less. The gap stayed wide through year three.
How this fits with other research
Rodgers et al. (2021) pooled 491 kids and saw the same direction: ABA beats eclectic care. Their effect sizes were smaller because they mixed many trials with different doses.
Anderson et al. (2024) seems to clash. They found 5–10 h/week modular ABA works as well as 15+ h/week standard ABA. The key difference is dose inside the ABA family, not ABA versus eclectic. The 2014 paper kept the high dose and still shows the biggest gap against non-ABA mixes.
Eldevik et al. (2010) shows the same program helps kids with intellectual disability too, not just autism.
Kovshoff et al. (2011) warns that when ABA stops, gains can fade. So the three-year win in Levin et al. (2014) needs a plan for what comes next.
Why it matters
You can tell funders that three full years of intensive ABA keeps a clear edge over mixed methods. If a family asks about low-hour models, show them Anderson et al. (2024) for dose debate, but keep the focus on eclectic versus ABA when the goal is biggest gains. Plan ahead for maintenance so the win does not slip away.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In a previous study, we compared the effects of just over one year of intensive behavior analytic intervention (IBT) provided to 29 young children diagnosed with autism with two eclectic (i.e., mixed-method) interventions (Howard, Sparkman, Cohen, Green, & Stanislaw, 2005). One eclectic intervention (autism programming; AP) was designed specifically for children with autism and was intensive in that it was delivered for an average of 25-30 h per week (n = 16). The other eclectic intervention (generic programming; GP) was delivered to 16 children with a variety of diagnoses and needs for an average of 15-17 h per week. This paper reports outcomes for children in all three groups after two additional years of intervention. With few exceptions, the benefits of IBT documented in our first study were sustained throughout Years 2 and 3. At their final assessment, children who received IBT were more than twice as likely to score in the normal range on measures of cognitive, language, and adaptive functioning than were children who received either form of eclectic intervention. Significantly more children in the IBT group than in the other two groups had IQ, language, and adaptive behavior test scores that increased by at least one standard deviation from intake to final assessment. Although the largest improvements for children in the IBT group generally occurred during Year 1, many children in that group whose scores were below the normal range after the first year of intervention attained scores in the normal range of functioning with one or two years of additional intervention. In contrast, children in the two eclectic treatment groups were unlikely to attain scores in the normal range after the first year of intervention, and many of those who had scores in the normal range in the first year fell out of the normal range in subsequent years. There were no consistent differences in outcomes at Years 2 and 3 between the two groups who received eclectic interventions. These results provide further evidence that intensive behavior analytic intervention delivered at an early age is more likely to produce substantial improvements in young children with autism than common eclectic interventions, even when the latter are intensive.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2014 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2014.08.021