Teaching Behaviorally Handicapped Preschool Children to Share

Abstract

We examined the effectiveness of Barton and Ascione's (1979) package for training sharing in a dassroom setting with six behaviorally handicapped preschool children, four of whom were also developmentally delayed. Individual responses in sharing and not sharing were examined. Training consisted of initial instructions, modeling, and behavioral rehearsal, followed by teacher prompts and praise regarding sharing directly in a dassroom free play period. Introduction of training in a multiple-baseline design across three pairs of children resulted in substantial increases in sharing for five of the six children. Results for negative interactions were less dear but suggested that concomitant decreases occurred for the same five children. The response analysis indicated that (a) individual components of sharing (offers, requests, and acceptances) all increased with training; (b) most children were more likely to initiate sharing through requests than through offers; (c) the proportion of sharing initiatives accepted by peers increased with training despite a much greater absolute number of initiatives; and (d) of the three negative behaviors (opposing play, taking without asking, and aggression) examined as incompatible with sharing, the most prevalent response was opposing other children's play. Individual differences in initial social repertoires and responsiveness to training were examined with respect to their implications for research and practice. Overall, the findings provide an encouraging indication of an intervention program for children with behavioral, social, and developmental handicaps.DESCRIPTORS: sharing, social behavior, dassroom behavior, preschool children Play in early childhood means spending time with other children, exploring and manipulating objects, pretending, and acting out roles (Asher, 1978;Fein, 1978). One skill that is integral to interactive play is sharing, in which children offer and exchange toys, materials, and play opportunities with one another. Descriptive studies show that sharing occurs naturally in the play of normal preschool children and that sharing is very likely

Using Multiple‐exemplar Training to Teach a Generalized Repertoire of Sharing to Children With Autism

“…Verbal sharing increased during training only for children who were taught to share verbally or both verbally and physically; however, verbal sharing did not generalize across settings. Bryant and Budd (1984) extended this training package to six preschoolers with disabilities, focusing on teaching specific components of sharing responses: offers, requests, and acceptances. All three components of sharing increased after implementation of instructions, modeling, and behavior rehearsals.…”

Training Prosocial Behaviors to Young Children: An Analysis of Reciprocity With Untrained Peers

“…Although a certain level of peer acceptance may be a necessary precondition for the maintenance of invitations, our results suggest that peer acceptance may not be sufficient to ensure maintenance. These results suggest that researchers not focus only on a given invitation and the immediate peer response to the invitation, as has been the case frequendy in the past (e.g., Bryant & Budd, 1984;Greenwood et al, 1982;Tremblay et al, 1981), but look also for reciprocal occurrences of the invitation. A comparison of Amanda's results with those for Betty and Sarah suggests that certain conditions may be necessary before peers will reciprocate invitations consistently and independently.…”

“…Researchers have maintained that the maintenance of a newly acquired behavior may be facilitated by peers' reciprocal use of it and the immediate peer response to it (cf. Bryant & Budd, 1984;Charlesworth and Hartup, 1967;Greenwood, Hops, Todd, & Walker, 1982;Strain et al, 1976;Tremblay et al, 1981). In our study, the peers' reciprocal exchange of the behavior appeared to be a significant variable.…”

A Social Skills Program for Developmentally Delayed Preschoolers

“…Odom, Hoyson, Jamieson, and Strain (1985) used peer-initiation procedures to encourage three handicapped children to interact socially. Bryant and Budd (1984) taught four developmentally handicapped preschoolers to share, using instructions, modeling, and behavioral rehearsal followed by teacher prompts.…”

“…Greetings, requests, offers to share, and invitations to play were included as target behaviors. Other studies have focused on only a subset of these behaviors (e.g., Bryant & Budd, 1984) or intervened with peer-initiators without training the target children themselves (Odom et al, 1985).…”