The title of the Responsive Teaching curriculum manual is "Autism and Developmental Delays in Young Children: The Responsive Teaching Curriculum for Parents and Professionals". This title was recommended by the publishers who wanted to emphasize the fact that RT has been used successfully with children with Autism Spectrum Disorders as well as with children who have a wide range of other developmental delays and disabilities.
But the fact is, as described in the following article, RT actually evolved from research we reported several years ago indicating that children with Down syndrome who had the highest levels of cognitive and communication functioning were the children whose parents engaged in highly responsive interactions with them (Mahoney, Fingers & Powell, 1984; Mahoney, 1988a, 1988b) . In fact, although RT has yet to be evaluated with a large sample of children with Down syndrome, the children with Down syndrome who have participated in our evaluation studies have made remarkable improvements in their cognitive and communication functioning that are similar to the improvements made by all children who have participated in this intervention.
The attached article which was published in Down Syndrome Research and Practice describes the research we conducted with young children with Down syndrome and their parents that set us on the path to developing Responsive Teaching. In this article we argue that since RT can be used to address children’s social emotional as well as developmental needs, one potential advantage of RT is that it may also be effective at addressing some of the early behavioral problems that are frequently reported with children with Down syndrome.