What’s One More Evidence Based Intervention Tip for Students with ASD?

Naturalistic Intervention has been shown through research to be EBP for building communication and social skills for students of all ages and cognitive levels.

Naturalistic Interventions are a group of strategies to address behavior, specific interaction types, and environmental engineering.  They target building specific skills through use of the student’s interests.

aac and autism




The checklist the National Professional Development Center on ASD provides includes steps to identify a specific target behavior or skill and identify baseline, train team members, identify contexts for providing intervention, arranging the environment in a manner that will elicit the target behavior, engage the student, and use specific strategies to teach and intervene.  
Modeling is a specific strategy identified, as are a time-delay strategy and incidental teaching.
evidence based strategies for autism

One of the parts of this model that easily overlap with AAC implementation strategies is the planning out of the student’s day and identifying contexts in which to model.  We speak of listing out the student’s daily activities, the partners involved and the vocabulary or function to use, as well as engineering the environment to ensure that the opportunities exist to elicit the target skill.

Just as we, in AAC implementation, want to ensure that the user is engaged in genuine communication interactions, so Naturalistic Intervention speak to following the individual’s lead and “engage the learner in language-rich, learner-directed, and reciprocal interactions…”


The Naturalistic Intervention Module was developed by the NPDC on ASD in 2009.

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