The present study evaluated a systematic instructional package including the system of least prompts (SLP) to teach differentiation and selection of tangible symbols to continue activities for two children with complex support needs and deafblindness (DB). A multiple probe design across three symbols was used to evaluate the intervention package…

Despite the effectiveness and widespread use of functional communication training (FCT), resurgence of destructive behavior can occur if the functional communication response (FCR) contacts a challenge, such as lapses in treatment integrity. We evaluated a method to mitigate resurgence by conducting FCT using a multiple schedule of reinforcement…

We taught 4 participants with autism to discriminate between the reinforced and nonreinforced responses of an adult model and evaluated the effectiveness of this intervention using a multiple baseline design. During baseline, participants were simply exposed to adult models' correct and incorrect responses and the respective consequences of each.…

The most researched and effective practice for instructing children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is applied behavior analysis (ABA; Baer, Wolf, & Risley, 1968; Reichow, 2012; Smith & Eikeseth, 2011; Virués-Ortega, 2010). ABA is a scientific approach to systematic instruction, data collection, and data analysis based on observable…

Research suggests that school-aged individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) tend to be less physically active than their typically developing peers (e.g., Shields, King, Corbett, & Imms, 2014). While these students can be successful in acquiring motor and sport-related skills during physical education, they tend not to use those skills…

Although massed-trial instruction, distributed-trial instruction, and task interspersal have been shown to be effective methods of teaching skills to children with autism spectrum disorders, they have not been directly compared. In the current study, we taught 6 children to tact shapes of countries using these methods to determine which would…

Teachers often use in-class questions to examine the level of understanding of their students, while these also enable students to reorganize their acquired knowledge. However, previous studies have shown that students may resist being questioned because of negative emotions. Therefore, this paper proposes the idea of eliciting positive emotions…

We taught social responses to young children with autism using an adult as the recipient of the social interaction and then assessed generalization of performance to adults and peers who had not participated in the training. Although the participants' performance was similar across adults, responding was less consistent with peers, and a…

Mands sometimes are taught using the question "What do you want?" as a supplement to the required features of the mand relation: an establishing operation and a related consequence. Although verbal prompts have been used during mand training, they also may result in undesirable stimulus control. However, no direct empirical evidence exists to…

The current study examined the effectiveness and efficiency of presenting secondary targets within learning trials for 4 children with an autism spectrum disorder. Specifically, we compared 4 instructional conditions using a progressive prompt delay. In 3 conditions, we presented secondary targets in the antecedent or consequence portion of…

We evaluated a program for teaching two adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to perform more advanced operations on an iPod-based speech-generating device (SGD). The effects of the teaching program were evaluated in a multiprobe multiple baseline across participants design that included two intervention phases. The first intervention…

The effect of a fixed-time (FT) schedule involving the delivery of preferred stimuli prior to the issuance of a low-probability instruction was evaluated with 2 young children with autism. The FT schedule was introduced according to a reversal design with 3 target instructions, 1 for the first child and 2 for the second child. Compliance increased…

A review of the literature was conducted for articles published between 2003 and 2010 to build a case for the degree to which evidence-based practices were documented for teaching academic skills to students with severe developmental disabilities. This review extended earlier comprehensive work in literacy, mathematics, and science for the…

Problem Statement: Literacy skills are extremely important for all individuals, especially children with autism, because these skills provide a channel for educational assessment and learning as well as enhance vocational opportunities, promote self-expression, and facilitate independent living. Some individuals with autism cannot acquire academic…

We evaluated the addition of stimuli after the praise statement of a trial (instructive feedback) in which the stimuli were not attached sequentially to the target stimuli. All students reached criterion level responding of target behaviors despite the extra information presented, and three of four high school students with disabilities acquired…