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Individual Therapy    

After assessment, children typically begin therapy with individual sessions to develop and then address their instructional goals. Children will receive training from a graduate student clinician from either the Communication Disorders and Sciences or Behavior Analysis and Therapy program or both. Individual sessions are supervised by SIU faculty. Sessions may be up to 30 minutes initially, and then progress to 60 minutes or more. One of the first goals of individual therapy is to bring the child under instructional control. That means we teach the child to sit or stay in place, attend to instructions and instructional materials, engage in an activity directed by the clinician, and respond to instructions.


This is an important first step so children can profit from instruction. Another important goal of these sessions is to identify effective instructional techniques that can be used to promote learning for individual children. Their individually determined goals in therapy typically include teaching motor and vocal imitation, as well as basic language skills (e.g., requesting what children want and naming objects). In addition, children are taught to make basic visual discriminations, play appropriately, and perform other routines that are typical in preschool settings. Challenging behaviors also are addressed.

After children make progress in individual therapy, they may be considered for one of our group therapy programs where they will have the opportunity to learn language and social skills while interacting with other children.