Abstract
Comprehensive program to teach skills to children with autism. The purpose of this research was to test a comprehensive system to teach skills to children diagnosed with autism. Three children received intensive teaching during three months, approximately. Each child received a daily set of programs tailored to his/her functional level. These programs had been demonstrated effective in previous studies to teach children with learning difficulties. Other programs were derived from basic learning principles. We evaluated on a continuous basis the effectiveness of each program with each child, so that the programs that were not effective were replaced by others with more detailed procedures. The three children learned about one skill for every hour of teaching. They learned more skills per hour when the intervention was intensive; this outcome shows that an intensive program increases the effectiveness of the intervention. In all, this system was demonstrated to be effective to teach skills to children with autism. Thus, it served to increase children's quality of life and that of their families. The present intervention can be applied to schools of special education.
