Using modeling and rehearsal to teach fire safety to children with autism

Abstract

We evaluated the efficacy of an instructional procedure to teach young children with autism to evacuate settings and notify an adult during a fire alarm. A multiple baseline design across children showed that an intervention that included modeling, rehearsal, and praise was effective in teaching fire safety skills. Safety skills generalized to novel settings and maintained during a 5-week follow-up in both training and generalization settings.

Teaching handwriting skills to children with intellectual disabilities using an adapted handwriting programme

“…For example, 'big line down, little line across, little line across' for a capital letter F. A modelling, or imitation, procedure is also used extensively in the HWT approach. Modelling is also well documented as an evidence-based teaching strategy for social skills (Argott, Townsend, and Poulson, 2017;Whitehill, Hersen, and Bellack, 1980) and functional life skills (Garcia, Dukes, Brady, Scott, and Wilson, 2016).…”

Systematic Review of Safety Skill Interventions for Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Gender was not identified for 16 participants (25.8%) in five studies (e.g., Rossi et al, 2017). Thirty-one (50%) participants were school age (7–15 years; n =12; e.g., Ergenekon, 2012), 18 participants (27.4%) were preschool age (2–6 years; n = 7; e.g., Garcia et al, 2016), and 13 participants (20.9%) were adolescents or young adults ( n = 5; e.g., Winterling et al, 1992). Investigators predominantly examined the effects of SSI with individuals with an autism diagnosis ( n = 40) in 14 studies (e.g., Summers et al, 2011) and individuals having comorbidity (i.e., at least one additional label; n = 15) in seven studies (e.g., Kearney et al, 2018).…”

“…Investigators used SSI to teach pedestrian skills ( n = 3; e.g., Honsberger, 2015), abduction skills ( n = 3; e.g., Gunby & Rapp, 2014), domestic safety skills and/or home accident prevention skills ( n = 2; e.g., Summers et al, 2011), water safety skills ( n = 2; e.g., Levy et al, 2017), seeking help when lost ( n = 2; e.g., Hoch et al, 2009), first-aid skills ( n = 2; e.g., Kearney et al, 2018), safety response in the presence and absence of dangerous fire starting stimuli and poisonous liquid stimuli ( n = 1; Rossi et al, 2017), poison prevention skills ( n = 1; King & Miltenberger, 2017), fire safety skills ( n = 1; Garcia et al, 2016), and sexual abuse protection skill ( n = 1; Johnston, 2010).…”

“…Limited research on safety skills instruction (SSI) has shown that, when taught systematically, individuals with ASD can learn various safety skills. Behavioral skill training (BST; Garcia et al, 2016), video modeling and prompting (Akmanoglu & Tekin-Iftar, 2011), and other prompting strategies (Harriage et al, 2016) are examples of interventions used for teaching safety skills. While outcomes are promising, research reveals that teachers and parents of children with ASD do not provide systematic instruction on safety skills as needed (Sirin & Tekin-Iftar, 2016).…”

Evaluation of an Immersive Virtual Reality Safety Training Used to Teach Pedestrian Skills to Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…In 2010, Dixon, Bergstrom, Smith, and Tarbox conducted a review of safety skills training for individuals with developmental disabilities and identified a number of studies that evaluated behavioral and educational safety skills trainings on emergency situations, accident prevention, and pedestrian skills; however, at the time of that review, very few studies included participants with ASD diagnoses. Since that review, many more studies have focused on safety skills training for individuals with ASD, which have addressed skills for abduction prevention and appropriate response to lures from strangers (Akmanoglu & Tekin-Iftar, 2011;Bergstrom, Najdowski, & Tarbox, 2014;Gunby, Carr, & LeBlanc, 2010;Gunby & Rapp, 2014;Ledbetter-Cho et al, 2016), pedestrian safety (Harriage, Blair, & Miltenberger, 2016;Josman, Ben-Chaim, Friedrich, & Weiss, 2008;Saiano, Garbarino, Lumachi, Solari, & Sanguineti, 2015;Saiano, Garbarino, Lumachi, Solari, & Sanguineti, 2015), lost skills (Bergstrom, Najdowski, & Tarbox, 2012;Carlile, DeBar, Reeve, Reeve, & Meyer, 2018;Hoch, Taylor, & Rodriguez, 2009), first aid (Ergenekon, 2012;Kearney, Brady, Hall, & Honsberger, 2018), household safety (Rossi, Vladescu, Reeve, & Gross, 2017;Summers et al, 2011), water safety (Alaniz, Rosenberg, Beard, & Rosario, 2017;Levy, Ainsleigh, & Hunsinger-Harris, 2017), fire safety (Garcia, Dukes, Brady, Scott, & Wilson, 2016), and general safety and body safety concepts for the prevention of sexual assault (Kenny, Bennett, Dougery, & Steele, 2013). With some exceptions, recent safety skills research has mainly incorporated behavioral techniques, such as instruction, video or live modeling, role-playing, praise, and corrective feedback.…”