Teaching a child with autism to request help only when needed

Abstract

Purpose Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) or other developmental disabilities are often reported to have challenges in well generalizing the newly learned communicative skills such as requesting help. Not requesting help when it is needed can hinder engagement and learning, whereas requesting help could also be socially inappropriate. This paper aims to offer a demonstration of applying general case instruction to teach a young child diagnosed with ASD to request help only when needed while concurrently increasing the child’s independence in task completion. Design/methodology/approach The demonstration adopted within-participant AB designs for one 5-year-old boy with ASD, with data collected across three tasks targeted for intervention and the other three tasks targeted for generalization probes throughout both the baseline and intervention phases. Dependent measures consisted of independent help request and independent task completion. Visual analysis was used to describe the results. Findings Results showed that the child with ASD learned to ask for help on difficult educational activities, while concurrently increasing his independence on these tasks; generalized the skill of requesting help by asking for help when he encountered other challenging novel tasks; and independently completed easy educational activities without requesting help. Originality/value The findings from this study may add to the limited literature that explored the generalization performance across tasks/activities in young learners with ASD, while demonstrating the feasibility of designing and applying general case instruction framework to enhance generalization performance for one individual learner.

Generalization and Discrimination of Positively Reinforced Explicit Mands in Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Saying "goldfish, please" is a discriminated positively reinforced explicit mand if the child asks for goldfish after they have not had access to a snack for several hours (i.e., state of deprivation present) and refrain from asking for goldfish after they just ate a bag of goldfish (i.e., state of deprivation absent). Although several researchers have demonstrated the effectiveness of mand training in teaching discriminated positively reinforced mands to children with ASD (e.g., Carnett et al, 2019;Chezan, Drasgow, Legg, & Hollborn, 2016;Chezan et al, 2019;Gutierrez et al, 2007Gutierrez et al, , 2010, the literature on discriminated positively reinforced explicit mands is relatively limited and needs further investigation (Chen, 2019;Chen et al, 2021).…”

“…Enhancing the mand repertoire of children with ASD has been associated with the development of their overall verbal behavior. For example, researchers have demonstrated that teaching children with ASD to mand for preferred items or activities increased their spontaneous verbal behavior (Charlop et al, 1985; Sweeney-Kerwin et al, 2007), fostered the acquisition of other verbal operants such as tacts (DeSouza et al, 2017), resulted in improved interpersonal communication and community functioning (Chen et al, 2022), and produced a decrease in problem behavior (e.g., Choi et al, 2010; Chow et al, 2018; Falcomata et al, 2013; Fritz et al, 2013; Kreibich et al, 2015). The findings of these studies revealed the critical importance of mands to children’s verbal behavior and their effective functioning in the natural environment and, thus, highlighted the need to implement effective language intervention programs.…”