A brief report on the Verbal Behavior Curriculum (VBC) to teach children with autism and other language disorders.

Abstract

This article gives an account of the development of a scope-and-sequence based curriculum, the Verbal Behavior Curriculum, and an overview of the learning principles that directed its design and incorporation of instructional delivery and management procedures. The curriculum was informed by both Skinnerian and post-Skinnerian accounts of complex language and cognitive behaviors, instructional design and delivery technologies derived from discrete trial-based, Direct Instruction and Precision Teaching research as well as application concepts. The bulk of the article details that part of the curriculum’s design intended to instantiate 3 critical behavioral repertoires (aka cusps): (a) early stages of participative, listener and observant skills, essential components for social behavior, (b) readiness/attention skills that enable the acquisition of missing prerequisite skills to acquire high order generative language, and (c) use of language skills in social situations to develop the full potential of the learner, sometimes turning into a fully verbal individual.