A scale to assess the restrictiveness of educational settings

The placement of students into educational settings is perhaps one of the most debated issues in special education, particularly for students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). A primary consideration in this decision is the restrictiveness of the setting, yet no scale to assess restrictiveness of educational settings exists. We undertook two surveys that asked respondents to rate the restrictiveness of 18 educational placements. The first survey was sent to a national panel of experts, the second survey was sent to supervisors of programs for students with EBD. The results of the surveys led to the development of theScale to Assess Restrictiveness of Educational Settings. This scale is designed to provide a measure of restrictiveness of educational settings that can provide data to evaluate student progress and program outcomes.     

Teaching young adults with developmental disabilities and visual impairments to use tape-recorded recipes: Acquisition,generalization, and maintenance of cooking skills

Three young adults with developmental disabilities and visual impairments were taught to prepare three different recipes using tape-recorded instructions. Following instruction on each trained recipe, generality probes to untrained recipes were conducted. A multiple baseline across behaviors (recipes) design was used to determine the extent to which each student's preparation of untrained recipes improved as a function of being trained to prepare related recipes by using a self-operated audio prompting system. Results showed that students' cooking skills acquired through instruction on the trained recipes generalized (a) to untrained recipes requiring similar skills (simple generality) and (b) to more complex untrained recipes requiring a combination of skills learned during the instruction of two trained recipes (complex generality).     

Behavior Therapy in a Family Context: Treating Elective Mutism

This paper discusses the necessity of using both behavioral and family approaches in combination, while working with electively mute children. The symptom and its significance within the family system is presented along with a rationale for avoiding the pitfalls of individual approaches with such children. A case history outlining specific behavioral techniques is described in detail with an exploration of the use of reinforcement theory, counter-conditioning, and successive approximations in bringing about change in electively mute children. The need for bringing about changes within the family system so as to maintain the changes that have occurred through use of the behavior techniques is discussed and presented as crucial to the treatment process. The paper takes the position that either approach, by itself, will not be effective in helping electively mute children but that the treatment of choice is a combination of therapeutic techniques.     

Brief report: On becoming a group therapist

Clinicians have become group therapists via many routes, either voluntarily or not. Group psychotherapy itself has had a checkered history, in that it has often been seen as an ancillary or a second choice form of treatment. Indeed, we know that there is a growing number of well-respected clinicians who are not only not ambivalent about being seen as group clinicians, but embrace this reality as a primary clinical identity. It has occurred to us that no one has looked deeply at this developmental path or what facilitates or inhibits movement along this path. This article is a preliminary attempt to initiate this line of study.     

Increasing the efficiency of instruction for a person with severe disabilities: The applicability of Fitts' law in predicting response time

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the applicability of Fitts' law in predicting the response duration of instruction-specific head movements for a person with severe multiple disabilities. Fitts' law is a motoric algorithm that calculates an index of difficulty (ID) for responses in relation to the variables of stimulus width and stimulus amplitude. Four functional tasks from the learner's current continuing education plans were targeted: photocopying, using a paint well, model painting, and communication symbol sequencing. For each of the four tasks, two sets of indices were calculated by (1) holding constant stimulus width while varying amplitude, and (2) holding constant stimulus amplitude while varying width. Results showed that response duration varied as a function of ID variation.     

Setting events controlling social verbal exchanges between students with developmental delays

The peer social verbal exchanges (social conversational units) between four developmentally delayed students were studied as a function of setting events. A single conversational unit consisted of a verbal exchange in which each individual functioned as both speaker and listener. Each unit included a three term verbal contingency. Data were collected by trained observers viewing videotapes of 20-minute sessions in which running times were burned onto the videotape. Frequencies of social conversational units were measured under two conditions. Comparisons were made between sessions in which the teacher responded only when spoken to and sessions in which the teacher was absent using a combined reversal and multiple schedule design. Results showed that peer conversational units emerged at high rates when the teacher was absent and at low or nonexistent rates when the teacher responded only when spoken to in the living room setting. The setting and audience control for peer verbal exchanges were discussed as functions possibly of either a punishing audience, establishing operations, or response deprivation.     

Instructive feedback: A comparison of simultaneous and alternating presentation of non-target stimuli

Instructive feedback involves presenting extra, non-target stimuli in the consequent events for children's responses. Two methods of presenting instructive feedback during direct instruction were compared. These methods involved presenting two extra stimuli on all trials, and presenting the two extra stimuli separately on alternating trials. Preschool students were taught coin combinations using a constant time delay procedure with instructive feedback stimuli added to both praise and correction statements. An adapted alternating treatments design was used to evaluate the two methods of presenting instructive feedback. The students were assessed to determine the extent to which instructive feedback stimuli were learned. The results indicate that students learned some of the instructive feedback stimuli and no consistent differences in the effectiveness of the two presentation methods were noted. Further, relationships between the two instructive feedback stimuli appeared to be established. Implications for instruction and future research are discussed.     

Teaching a chained task with a simultaneous prompting procedure

Simultaneous prompting, a type of antecedent prompt and test procedure, was used to teach the chained task of making juice from a frozen concentrate using a pictorial recipe to four elementary-aged students with moderate intellectual disabilities. Using a multiple probe design, all students acquired the task and maintained the behavior with at least 85% accuracy up to 60 days after training was terminated. In addition, students generalized the skill across settings and materials. The students' ability to expressively identify the words shown on the recipe cards was tested prior to and after training. Although not directly trained, three of the four students increased their ability to read the words.