Princeton Child Development Institute

Abstract Evaluating effects of utilizing parents as therapists for treating behavior problems has become increasingly important in the dissemination and practice of applied behavior analysis. However, home‐based parent training approaches have been underused in treating feeding problems. In this study, mothers were trained to implement differential reinforcement of alternative behavior (DRA) combined with non‐removal of the spoon and demand fading for the treatment of their childrens' food selectivity. The procedures were highly effective and generalization to untargeted foods was observed. Parent procedural integrity and parent collected interobserver agreement (IOA) data remain high throughout the study. This study also demonstrated an effective method for systematically decreasing reinforcement magnitude and schedules in an effort to mimic traditional reinforcer delivery such as intermittently providing a dessert at the end of the meal. Finally, this study successfully increased a demand fading ratio of 50–150% without noticeable side effects. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Engaging in spontaneous social exchanges is a central skill deficit of children with autism, and one that is often difficult to remediate. The 3 boys (ages 4, 4, and 5 years) who participated in this study had acquired small verbal repertoires, but typically spoke only when answering questions or requesting preferred edible items or toys, and did not converse with a familiar teacher during baseline. During teaching, textual cues ("Look" and "Watch me") were embedded in the youngsters' photographic activity schedules; after learning to use the scripts, the children's verbal elaborations and unscripted interactions increased and were maintained when a new recipient of interaction was introduced. After scripts were faded, unscripted interactions not only continued but also generalized to different activities that had not been the topic of teaching. The script-fading procedure enabled children with autism to converse with adults, to benefit from adults' language models, and to engage in language practice that contributes to fluency.

Although intervention technology has grown substantially during the past quarter century, the design of intervention systems has not grown apace. This paper examines organizational arrangements that enhance and diminish treatment effectiveness and argues that defining, measuring, and manipulating systemic antecedent and consequent variables are as important as assessment and intervention on an individual client's behalf.

The parents of 3 boys with autism were taught to help their children follow photographic activity schedules depicting a variety of home-living tasks. A multiple baseline across participants showed that the home-based intervention produced increases in children's engagement and social initiations and decreases in disruptive behavior, which were maintained for as long as 10 months.

A script that was systematically faded from end to beginning was used to teach peer initiations about recently completed, current, and future activities. The effectiveness of the script-fading procedure was assessed via a multiple baseline design across 4 children with autism. During baseline, the children seldom initiated to peers, although all had previously acquired some functional expressive language and sometimes spontaneously addressed adults. When the script was introduced, peer initiations increased, and as the script was faded, unscripted initiations increased. With the minimal written prompts available in the final fading steps, initiations generalized to a different setting, time, teacher, and activity; and for 3 of the 4 children, peer initiations were maintained at a 2-month follow-up. After the script was faded, the participants' levels of peer initiations were within the same range as a normative sample of 3 nondisabled youngsters. The script-fading procedure enabled children with severe social and verbal deficits to practice context-specific, peer-directed generative language that was not prompted by adults or peer confederates.

We used a graduated guidance procedure to teach 4 boys with autism to follow photographic activity schedules to increase on-task and on-schedule behavior. The multiple baseline across participants design included baseline, teaching, maintenance, resequencing of photographs, and generalization to novel photographs phases. The results indicated that photographic activity schedules (albums depicting after-school activities) produced sustained engagement, and skills generalized to a new sequence of photographs and to new photographs. The acquisition of schedule-following skills enabled these children with severe developmental disabilities to display lengthy response chains, independently change activities, and change activities in different group home settings in the absence of immediate supervision and prompts from others.

Abstract In this study, an autistic youth served as peer prompter for three other autistic adolescents. The peer prompter encouraged the other boys to talk about sports, a topic frequently discussed by typical teenagers. A multiple‐baseline design across participants was used to assess the effectiveness of the peer‐prompting procedure. During baseline, the youth rarely talked about sports, although all three had previously completed a sports‐appreciation class and had displayed large pre‐to‐post gains on a paper‐and‐pencil test. During intervention, when a peer prompted sports discussions, all three youth engaged in much more sports‐related conversation. Generalization measures indicated that: (1) the youth engaged in sports discussions in groups, as well as in the dyads that characterized the training situation; (2) they talked about sports in a setting other than the training setting; (3) they discussed sports with their peers when an unfamiliar teacher was present; and (4) they continued to discuss sports when training tapes and behavioral contracts between the teacher and the peer prompter were withdrawn. Previously, it has been common to use nonhandicapped or less‐handicapped peers as tutors; this study demonstrates that an autistic youth may also effectively serve as a prompter who assists his schoolmates in acquiring conversational skills that contribute to their normalization.

In an extension of incidental teaching procedures to reading instruction, two autistic children acquired functional sight-word reading skills in the context of a play activity. Children gained access to preferred toys by selecting the label of the toy in tasks requiring increasingly complex visual discriminations. In addition to demonstrating rapid acquisition of 5-choice discriminations, they showed comprehension on probes requiring reading skills to locate toys stored in labeled boxes. Also examined was postteaching transfer across stimulus materials and response modalities. Implications are that extensions of incidental teaching to new response classes may produce the same benefits documented in communication training, in terms of producing generalization concurrent with skill acquisition in the course of child-preferred activities.