Increasing social initiations in children with autism: effects of a tactile prompt

An ABAB design was used to assess the effects of a tactile prompting device (i.e., a vibrating pager) as a prompt for the social initiations of 3 children with autism during free-play activities with typically developing peers. Results indicated that the tactile prompt was effective in increasing verbal initiations for all 3 children, and responses to peers' initiations were higher for 2 participants when the tactile prompt was used. Efforts to reduce the frequency of prompts while still maintaining rates of initiations were partially successful for 1 participant.     

Maintaining social initiations of withdrawn handicapped and nonhandicapped preschoolers through a response-dependent fading tactic

The effects of a teacher-implemented intervention and fading package on the social initiations of three withdrawn preschool children were investigated. Subjects' social initiations and any peer responses were recorded sequentially during free play. Intervention involved teacher prompting and contingent praise of specific social initiations (sharing, assisting, verbally organizing play) by each subject toward an available peer. Results indicated that (a) teacher prompts and praise increased the frequency of subjects' target initiation, (b) target initiations typically received a positive peer response, (c) subjects' extended interactions with peers also increased, (d) abrupt, complete removal of teacher prompting resulted in similarly abrupt reductions in subjects' social initiations, whereas response-dependent fading maintained subjects' initiations and interactions above baseline levels. Follow-up data 2 1/2 months later showed that the social initiations and interactions of two of the children remained above baseline levels.This research was supported in part by Grant No. 007802088, U.S. Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services, and by Grant No. HD15051 from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. The authors wish to thank John Aiken, Gwen Beegle, Evelyn Parker, and Luis Olivera for their asistance in data collection, and Paula Goodroe, Kathy Green, and the children of the Experimental School for their cooperation in conducting this study.     

Teachers' and students' verbal behaviours during cooperative and small‐group learning

Background. Teachers play a critical role in promoting interactions between students and engaging them in the learning process. This study builds on a study by Hertz‐Lazarowitz and Shachar (1990) who found that during cooperative learning teachers' verbal behaviours were more helpful to and encouraging of their students' efforts while during whole‐class instruction, their verbal behaviours tended to be more authoritarian, rigid, and impersonal. Aim. This study seeks to determine if teachers who implement cooperative learning engage in more facilitative learning interactions with their students than teachers who implement group work only. The study also seeks to determine if students in the cooperative groups model their teachers' behaviours and engage in more positive helping interactions with each other than their peers in the group work groups. Samples. The study involved 26 teachers and 303 students in Grades 8 to10 from 4 large high schools in Brisbane, Australia. Methods. All teachers agreed to establish cooperative, small‐group activities in their classrooms for a unit of work (4 to 6 weeks) once a term for 3 school terms. The teachers were audiotaped twice during these lessons and samples of the students' language, as they worked in their groups, were also collected at the same time. Results. The results show that teachers who implement cooperative learning in their classrooms engage in more mediated‐learning interactions and make fewer disciplinary comments than teachers who implement group work only. Furthermore, the students model many of these interactions in their groups. Conclusions. The study shows that when teachers implement cooperative learning, their verbal behaviour is affected by the organizational structure of the classroom.     

A DIRECT PROMPTING STRATEGY FOR INCREASING RECIPROCAL INTERACTIONS BETWEEN HANDICAPPED AND NONHANDICAPPED SIBLINGS

We investigated the effects of a sibling training procedure, consisting of direct prompting and modeling, on the occurrence of reciprocal interactions between nonhandicapped and handicapped siblings. Data were obtained for training, generalization, and follow-up. Results of a multiple-baseline design across three pairs of siblings showed that: (a) direct prompting of interactions was an effective strategy for increasing reciprocal interactions between handicapped and nonhandicapped siblings; (b) the training procedure resulted in increased levels of initiations and responsiveness to initiations; (c) reciprocal interactions between siblings generalized to larger play groups or across settings; (d) reciprocal interactions between handicapped subjects and untrained, nonhandicapped peers increased without direct training; (e) the siblings' levels of interactions were maintained at 6 mo follow-up; and (f) these findings were judged socially valid by the siblings' parents.     

NORMAL CHILDREN AS TUTORS TO TEACH SOCIAL RESPONSES TO WITHDRAWN MENTALLY RETARDED SCHOOLMATES: TRAINING,MAINTENANCE, AND GENERALIZATION

The findings of the three experiments reported herein indicate that normal children can successfully teach social responses (i.e., delayed imitation, cooperative play, and verbalization of positive comments) to withdrawn mentally retarded peers. The effects of the intervention generalized across stimulus and response conditions, while the trained and generalized levels of responding were maintained after the end of the intervention. Moreover, the subjects developed social responding within their classrooms and play areas parallel to the intervention and continued to increase such responding after the interruption of the intervention. Direct edible reinforcement appeared to be necessary at least during the initial period of the intervention. Vicarious edible reinforcement seemed useful to prompt the appearance of responding. Vicarious social reinforcement was ineffective at the beginning of the intervention, but apparently acquired prompting power at a later stage of training. Generalization results indicated that the similarity between the response occasions used for training and those used for testing generalization played an important role. Yet, the extensiveness of training and the development of responding within the classrooms and play areas may also have had a relevant effect. The development of social responding within the classrooms and play areas appeared to be mainly the effect of new learning. This was perhaps due to vicarious and direct social reinforcement.     

The effects of reinforcement rate on the spontaneous social initiations of socially withdrawn preschoolers.

Social skills priming was used to increase the spontaneous social initiations of 2 socially withdrawn preschoolers, 1 of whom had been diagnosed with autism. During priming sessions, the teacher prompted and reinforced social behaviors (e.g., smiling, verbal initiations). We varied the rate of reinforcement during priming sessions and measured the effects of this manipulation on the rate of spontaneous social initiations during the subsequent classroom activity. Spontaneous initiations were more frequent after high rates of reinforcement than after low rates of reinforcement.     

FADING TEACHER PROMPTS PROM PEER-INITIATION INTERVENTIONS FOR YOUNG CHILDREN WITH DISABILITIES

This study examined a system for fading teacher prompts to children who served as peers in peer-initiation interventions for young children with disabilities. A teacher taught peers to direct social initiations to children with disabilities, provided verbal prompts for those initiations, and introduced a system that provided peers with visual feedback about the social interactions of the children with disabilities. She then systematically withdrew the verbal prompts to peers, and subsequently faded the visual feedback system. Peer initiations increased when the intervention began and resulted in increases in social interaction for the children with disabilities. As the teacher systematically faded the prompts and visual feedback to the peers, social interaction continued at the levels found during intervention and was maintained during a short maintenance period.     

Further evaluation of prompt density,rate of reinforcement,and the persistence of manding

Previous research has evaluated the effects of prompt rates on the rate of communicative behavior. More recent research has suggested that dense prompting can result in communicative behavior that is more resistant to change. However, existing research has not considered the impact that higher response rates had on reinforcement rate, a variable known to impact response persistence. The current study systematically replicated previous research by evaluating communicative responding in contexts associated with dense- and lean-prompt schedules and extended existing research by (a) holding reinforcement rates similar across the two prompting schedules (lean and dense), and (b) evaluating the persistence of communicative responding in the contexts associated with each prompting schedule. The results for Experiment 1 clearly replicated and extended previous research. The results for Experiment 2 were equivocal and suggested that previous reinforcement history and response class size impacted outcomes.     

Response and associative phase components of elaborative prompt effects in children's noun-pair learning

The effects of aural and pictorial elaborative prompts were estimated separately for response and associative phase components of children's nounpair learning. A 20-item list of noun pairs was administered individually to 200 second- and third-grade children by the method of paired-associates. Indices of response learning (free verbal recall and pictorial identification) revealed equivalent effects among prompt conditions whereas measures of associative learning (multiple-choice pictorial-recognition tests) demonstrated substantial performance facilitation as a function of both aural and pictorial elaborative prompts. This outcome was regarded as an unequivocal identification of the locus of elaborative prompt effects in children's nounpair learning.     

PROMPTING PATRON SAFETY BELT USE AT A RESTAURANT

A reversal (ABABAB) design was used to assess the effects of a verbal prompt on safety belt use of restaurant patrons. A verbal prompt delivered by employees at the exit door resulted in an average increase of 20% in safety belt use by drivers leaving the restaurant. A previous study provided this type of antecedent immediately before supermarket patrons entered their vehicles. This effort demonstrates the effects of a verbal prompt with greater latency between the prompt and target response.     

Effects of parent training on parent instruction and child learning of intellectual skills

The present investigation examined the effects of a brief parent training package on parental application of behavioral procedures during child instruction. In addition, it investigated the effects of parent training on child learning of two intellectual skills. Forty-nine parents and their $\text{2}\text{1}\text{2}$ to 5-year-old children participated. A discriminant analysis revealed that the parent training package produced variations in parental use of modeling, physical prompting, verbal instructional prompting, and aversive control. However, the pattern of variations differed across instructional tasks. Regression analysis showed that parent training produced differences in child learning in one of the two skills targeted for instruction.     

Cooperative learning in the classroom: Contingencies,group interactions,and students with special needs

Cooperative learning activities play a significant role in the schools. As such, these activities should be of interest to applied behavior analysts concerned with educational interventions. A number of factors appear to contribute to the impact of cooperative group activities, including the level of individual accountability, group contingencies, and the types of interactive behaviors in which students engage during group activities. This paper reviews current research on cooperative learning, focusing on the relationships between student behaviors, contingencies of reinforcement and group outcomes. The social and academic skills with which students enter cooperative learning activities, and the impact of these skills on students' behavior within groups and on the social and academic outcomes of groups is considered. Problems associated with the failure of cooperative groups are also addressed. The research potentials for applied behavior analysts are discussed.     

Continuous executive function disruption interferes with application of an information integration categorization strategy

Category learning is often characterized as being supported by two separate learning systems. A verbal system learns rule-defined (RD) categories that can be described using a verbal rule and relies on executive functions (EFs) to learn via hypothesis testing. A nonverbal system learns non-rule-defined (NRD) categories that cannot be described by a verbal rule and uses automatic, procedural learning. The verbal system is dominant in that adults tend to use it during initial learning but may switch to the nonverbal system when the verbal system is unsuccessful. The nonverbal system has traditionally been thought to operate independently of EFs, but recent studies suggest that EFs may play a role in the nonverbal system—specifically, to facilitate the transition away from the verbal system. Accordingly, continuously interfering with EFs during the categorization process, so that EFs are never fully available to facilitate the transition, may be more detrimental to the nonverbal system than is temporary EF interference. Participants learned an NRD or an RD category while EFs were untaxed, taxed temporarily, or taxed continuously. When EFs were continuously taxed during NRD categorization, participants were less likely to use a nonverbal categorization strategy than when EFs were temporarily taxed, suggesting that when EFs were unavailable, the transition to the nonverbal system was hindered. For the verbal system, temporary and continuous interference had similar effects on categorization performance and on strategy use, illustrating that EFs play an important but different role in each of the category-learning systems.     

TRAINING AND GENERALIZATION OF AFFECTIVE BEHAVIOR DISPLAYED BY YOUTH WITH AUTISM

The purpose of this study was to teach contextually appropriate affective behavior to 4 youths with autism. Treatment consisted of modeling, prompting, and reinforcement introduced in a multiple baseline design across response categories of affective behavior. During treatment, verbal praise and tokens were delivered contingent on appropriate affective responding during training trials. Modeling and verbal prompting were used as correction procedures. Each youth received treatment in either three or four response categories. Treatment systematically increased responding within the response categories for all 4 participants, with effects being specific to the affective response categories under treatment. Treatment effects occurred across untrained scenarios, therapists, time, and settings, suggesting that generalization had occurred.     

PROMOTING AUTISTIC CHILDREN'S PEER INTERACTION IN AN INTEGRATED EARLY CHILDHOOD SETTING USING AFFECTION ACTIVITIES

Group affection activities were used to increase the interaction of three autistic children with their nonhandicapped peers in an integrated early childhood setting. Peer interaction increased during free play when the affection activities were conducted, but not when similar activities without the affection component were used. This interaction included initiations by both the autistic and nonhandicapped children, with reciprocal interactions occurring more frequently with nonhandicapped peers who had participated in the affection activities.     

The impact of verbal prompts on child safety-belt use in shopping carts

Each year thousands of children are injured by falling from shopping carts. Buckling children into the seats of shopping carts could prevent many of these injuries. A combined reversal and multiple baseline across settings design was used to evaluate the impact of verbal prompts on shopping cart safety-belt use in two stores. Safety-belt use increased following implementation of the verbal prompt. This study extends the literature on the efficacy of verbal prompting in the promotion of safety-belt use.