Early Achievements is an intervention program, paired with a professional development program, designed to accelerate learning and improve outcomes for preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) or other social and communication delays.

Early Achievements:

  • addresses learning needs of children with ASD and other social and communication disorders or delays.
  • promotes children’s development of school readiness skills and paves the way for success in and out of school.
  • emphasizes high-dosage, classroom learning experiences for children that target language, social communication, peer engagement, and other cognitive and social cognitive skills.
  • uses evidence-based instructional strategies that are anchored in the developmental, behavioral, and educational sciences.
  • embeds those strategies in group-level instructional activities already occurring within teachers’ classrooms.
  • Supports differentiated instruction and effective universal design for learning.
  • Uses instructional practices that are aligned with teachers’ values and established classroom routines.
  • provides workshops and practice-based coaching to equip teachers to effectively implement the Early Achievements intervention.

The Early Achievements intervention aims to promote children’s skill and knowledge development so as to improve their ability to construct meaning out of their experiences. This is accomplished, in part, through teachers’ use of an instructional approach that helps children connect bits of information, and integrate them into a meaningful, coherent whole. When children are taught how to make meaning of the people, language, and objects involved in an activity, their knowledge and skill base expands.

Coaches support teachers in learning how to:

  • Target core sets of child skill and knowledge development that are pivotal for children’s language, social, cognitive and literacy learning.
  • Use Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Intervention (NDBI) instructional strategies. NDBI strategies blend principles from the developmental sciences and applied behavior analysis.
  • Transform their classroom and instructional activities to amplify children’s motivation, engagement, and ability to construct meaning from their environment and experiences.

Research has shown that Early Achievements leads to increased child attention and active engagement, translating into improved learning and developmental gains.