The Effects of Simultaneous Prompting on the Acquisition of Calculating Elapsed Time in Children with Autism

Abstract

Simultaneous prompting has been effective in teaching a variety of skills, of different levels of complexity, to children with learning difficulties. The current study replicated and extended previous research by teaching three children with Autism to calculate elapsed time. Elapsed time is the duration from a start to end time. When the minutes of the start time are greater than the end time, regrouping is necessary. Simultaneous prompting was used to teach participants to discriminate the type of problem and engage in the respective behavior chain for problems that required (5-step) and did not require (3-step) regrouping. Results demonstrated that all three participants readily acquired the respective behavior chains and were able to accurately report the elapsed time for both types of problems.

Descriptive Analysis and Meta Analysis of Studies Investigating the Effectiveness of Simultaneous Prompting Procedure

“…To assess chained tasks, investigators used a single-opportunity method with 26 participants (e.g., assessed performance on a task analysis until error was made; e.g., Hudson et al, 2013) in seven studies and a multiple-opportunity method with 16 participants (e.g., discontinued assessment when an error was made; e.g., Fetko et al, 2013) in five studies. Assessment in one study consisted of permanent product recording with three participants (i.e., Ramirez et al, 2014).…”

“…Investigators have predominantly examined the effects of the SP procedure with individuals with intellectual disability ( n = 45; e.g., Batu, 2008). They also have conducted research with individuals with ASD ( n = 22; e.g., Ramirez, Cengher, & Fienup, 2014); developmental disabilities ( n = 8; e.g., Ozen, Ergenekon, & Ulke-Kurkcuoglu, 2017); multiple disabilities, such as intellectual disability, cerebral palsy, and developmental disabilities or physical disabilities and developmental disabilities ( n = 10; e.g., MacFarland-Smith, Schuster, & Stevens, 1993); attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ( n = 3; Hudson et al, 2013); typical development ( n = 2; e.g., Parker & Schuster, 2002); and emotional and behavioral disorders ( n = 1; i.e., Hudson et al, 2013).…”

“…Analyses of maintenance and generalization data showed the SP procedure to be effective in promoting maintenance and generalization of acquired skills. All but one investigation addressed maintenance (i.e., Ramirez et al, 2014). Investigators reported maintenance data for 88 participants.…”

“…From the results of this review, the SP procedure can be considered as evidence based for teaching individuals with intellectual disability and ASD. First, the criterion requiring a minimum of five studies categorized as meets standards and meets standards with reservations was met in that six studies had acceptable methodological rigor to support the SP procedure (i.e., Batu, 2008;Fetko et al, 2013;Gursel et al, 2006;Parker & Schuster, 2002;Ramirez et al, 2014;Rivera et al, 2017). Second, the criterion requiring that studies be conducted by at least three researcher groups with no overlapping authorship from three different geographic regions was met in that six of the above-cited studies were conducted by six different research groups from different regions in the United States and Turkey.…”

Teaching a Student with Poor Performance in Mathematics to Recall of Multiplication Facts Using Simultaneous Prompting with Systematic Review and Corrective Feedback

“…In Turkey, it is seen that goals of the multiplication skills are increasingly difficult from the second-grade level to the fourth one in the primary school mathematics program (Ministry of National Education, 2018) and multiplication is taught as a short way of addition. The skill of In the studies researching the effect of the SP in teaching mathematical skills to special needs students with poor mathematical performance, it is observed that the skills of recognizing numbers (Akmanoğlu and Batu, 2004), telling time (Karabulut and Yıkmış, 2010), recognizing numbers and telling time (Birkan, 2005), basic facts (Arı, Deniz, and Düzkantar, 2010;Fickel, Schuster, and Collins, 1998;McCormick, 2014), operations with decimal numbers (Rao and Kane, 2009), recognizing money (Tümeğ and Sazak-Pınar, 2016) identify mathematical symbols (Gürsel, Tekin-İftar and Bozkurt, 2006), solving time problems (Ramirez, Cengher, and Fienup, 2014); Pythagorean Theorem (Creech-Galloway, Collins, Knight, and Bausch, 2013) and determining the number of objects rapidly (Jimenez and Saunders, 2019) are taken into account as the target behaviors which are discrete or chaining. In these studies, it has been determined that, the instructions through the SP is effective in acquiring the selected target behaviors.…”