An evaluation of factors that influence children's instruction following

Abstract

Behavior that resembles instruction following might sometimes be under stimulus control of extraneous variables. We evaluated the effects of some of these variables (i.e., presence of relevant objects, associations between instructions and object sets) with 3 children with intellectual disabilities. In Experiment 1, we assessed whether subjects were more likely to follow instructions that required object manipulation and whether subjects were more likely to follow these instructions when only relevant objects were present. All subjects were more likely to follow instructions that required object manipulation when only relevant objects were present. In Experiment 2, we evaluated whether instruction following would be less likely if the same object set was associated with multiple instructions, and found this to be the case for 2 of 2 subjects. Findings highlight the need to train instruction following under different conditions to ensure that responding comes under stimulus control of the instructions.

Education Innovation Through Material Innovation in Primary Education: The ‘Grow-It-Yourself’ Workshop

“…Instructions should be simple and contain only the necessary information. Excessive amounts of instructions are a problem especially for students with special learning needs [28]. A suggested method for clear communication when giving instructions and for maintaining the creative input of the users during the process is the "cookbook approach" [27].…”

Evaluation of a preliminary method to examine antecedent and consequent contributions to noncompliance

“…When an instruction is presented, a child may not comply because he or she lacks the motor, vocal, or other skills necessary to perform the task. It is also possible that the words used in the instruction may not exert control over the response (Sy, Donaldson, Vollmer, & Pizarro, ). In lay terms, the child may not understand what is being asked of him or her.…”