An Evaluation of Instructive Feedback to Teach Play Behavior to a Child with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Instructive feedback is used to expose learners to secondary targets during skill acquisition programs (Reichow & Wolery, in Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 44, 327-340, 2011; Werts, Wolery, Gast, & Holcombe, in Journal of Behavioral Education, 5, 55-75, 1995). Although unrelated feedback may have clinical utility in practice, very little research has evaluated unrelated instructive feedback, particularly for promoting play behavior (Colozzi, Ward, & Crotty, in Education and Training in Developmental Disabilities, 43, 226-248, 2008). The purpose of the study was to determine if play emerged after embedding instructive feedback during the consequence portion of discrete trial training to teach tacts. An adapted alternating treatments design was used to compare tact training with and without instructive feedback for play behaviors. Instructive feedback resulted in the emergence of play behaviors during tabletop instruction and a play area of a classroom. We discuss the results in terms of clinical practice and future research.Keywords Autism . Instructive feedback . Play behaviors . Tact trainingInstructive feedback is a strategy used to expose learners to secondary training targets during skill acquisition programs (Reichow & Wolery, 2011;Werts, Wolery, Gast, & Holcombe, 1995;Wolery, Doyle, Ault, Gast, Meyer, & Stinson, 1991). For example, an instructor teaches a child to tact the name of several animals. During the reinforcement interval, the instructor tacts features of the animals in the presence of the child and moves onto the next trial (i.e., instructive feedback for a related secondary target). After teaching sessions, the modeled skills are probed under extinction. Learners with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have acquired secondary targets without explicit training by using instructive feedback (e.g., Loughrey, Betz, Majdalany, & Nicholson, 2014;Vladescu & Kodak, 2013).Much of the research has focused on teaching secondary targets that are expansions of the trained targets (Nottingham, Vladescu, & Kodak, 2015). That is, the trained and secondary targets are similar or related skills. For example, an instructor teaches a child to tact the name of the animal (i.e., trained target) and tacts the feature of the animal during the reinforcement interval (i.e., secondary target). Another type of instructive feedback is unrelated feedback in which the trained and secondary targets come from different skill areas. For example, an instructor teaches a child to tact the name of foods (i.e., trained targets) and models a play behavior during the reinforcement interval (i.e., secondary target). Although unrelated feedback may have clinical utility in practice because instructors can embed a variety of skills into instruction, with a few The data were collected while the authors were employees of the University of Nebraska Medical Center's Munroe-Meyer Institute.Implications for Practice • Shows a systematic evaluation of the effectiveness of a procedure for increasing play behaviors • Demonstrates...

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