Establishing Derived Equivalence Relations of Basic Geography Skills in Children with Autism

Abstract

The present study evaluated the efficacy of a stimulus-equivalence training procedure in teaching basic geography skills to two children with autism. The procedures were taken directly from a standardized training curriculum based in stimulus equivalence theory called Promoting the Emergence of Advanced Knowledge Equivalence Module (PEAK-E). Results suggest that the procedures were efficacious in directly training several geographical relations, as well as promoting the derivation of several untrained relations for three countries and their corresponding continents. In addition, responding generalized from selecting countries on a tabletop paper map to selecting countries on an interactive touchscreen map.

Equivalence‐based instruction of academic skills: Application to adolescents with autism

“…The results from the current study suggest that EBI can be used to teach advanced educational topics of history, mathematics, and chemistry to this population. This provides the first demonstration of EBI to teach these topics to individuals with adolescents with autism, and also serves as a systematic replication of Dixon et al (2016) and Dixon et al (2017) by further demonstrating that EBI procedures are effective and efficient teaching techniques worthy of continued investigation.…”

“…The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the efficacy of EBI in teaching academic relations germane to history, chemistry and mathematics to adolescents with autism. Previous research in this area has demonstrated the effectiveness of EBI in teaching academically relevant topics, such as geometry (Dixon et al, ) and geography (Dixon et al, ). In the current study, all participants demonstrated mastery of the targeted skills.…”

“…Given time constraints and limited resources often afforded to the treatment of individuals with autism, EBI may provide an efficient method of teaching academic topics that are both basic (colors, numbers, letters), and complex (science, history, technology). Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to serve as a systematic replication and extension of the prior two Dixon et al EBI studies (; ) to include the advanced academic topics typically addressed in history (historical figures and facts), chemistry (chemical names and common names), and mathematics (customary unit conversion) to adolescents with autism. To date, there have been no published studies on EBI that specifically target these academic topics in persons with autism.…”

“…Thus, only a fraction of the skills were trained; the remaining skills were acquired in the absence of direct training. In another recent example, Dixon et al () used EBI to teach children with autism geography skills. Specifically, the experimenters established equivalence among country names, country locations on a map, country flags, and continent names.…”

Tentativas de treino com reforçamento intercaladas em testes de equivalência por meio do procedimento Go/no-go com estímulos compostos em crianças com autismo

“…Uma vez que o MTS permite o estabelecimento de um número maior de relações além daquelas diretamente treinadas, sua ampla utilização em pesquisas básicas (e.g., Sidman, 1994;Sidman, 2009) e aplicadas (e.g., McLay, Sutherland, Church, & Tyler-Merrick, 2013; Rehfeldt, 2011)ocorredevido a economia no tempo de ensino que pode ser benéfica para umavariedade de populações.Com participantes com autismo, tal procedimento já foi empregado em pesquisas básicas (e.g., Eikeseth & Smith, 1992;Groskreutz, Karsina, Miguel, & Groskreutz, 2010; O'Connor, Barnes-Holmes, & Barnes-Holmes, 2011) e aplicadaspara ensinoo ensino de habilidades diversas comogeografia (Dixon et al, 2017;LeBlanc, Miguel, Cummings, Goldsmith, & Carr, 2003), habilidades com dinheiro (Keintz, Miguel, Kao, & Finn, 2012), habilidades acadêmicas (Stanley, Belisle, & Dixon, 2018), música (Arntzen, Halstadtro, Bjerke, & Halstadtro, 2010a;Hill, Griffith, & Miguel, 2019), seguir cronogramas de atividades (Miguel, Yang, Finn, & Ahearn, 2009) e relações entre letras maiúsculas/minúsculas (Varella & De Souza, 2015) e números/quantidades(e.g., McLay, Church, & Sutherland, 2014).Entretanto, esses estudos mostram que apenas algumas das relações testadas emergem (e.g., Arntzen et al, 2010), que emergência de todas as relações ocorre somente para alguns dos participantes (e.g., Groskreutz et al, 2010;Keintz et al, 2012;McLay et al, 2014)ou após o uso de treinos remediativos, como otreino de tato dos estímulos após a falha nos testes (e.g., Eikeseth & Smith, 1992) e treino com múltiplos exemplares (e.g., O'Connor et al, 2011).Além disso, entre os estudos publicados com essa população alguns apresentam problemas metodológicos como, o uso de participantes que já formavam classes de equivalência de acordo avaliações prévias (e.g., Dixon et al, 2017;Stanley et al, 2018), treino não intencional das relações emergentes (e.g., LeBlanc et al, 2003) e participantes que obtiveram porcentagem altas porcentagens de acerto nos pré-testes de relações emergentes (e.g., Miguel et al, 2009;…”