Unintentional injuries are one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality among children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). First aid training involves teaching critical first aid skills, some of which are designed to treat unintentional injuries. To date, no study has (a) evaluated the effects of a video-prompting…

Using telehealth technology to deliver parent training in evidence-based intervention has been suggested to increase the accessibility of such interventions and improve skill acquisition and generalization. Within behavior analysis, global restrictions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for the development of telehealth…

The present study used synchronous video conferencing to remotely deliver a behavioral skills training-based (BST) parent training program to 3 parents of children with autism in the family home. Parents were taught to implement graduated guidance to teach their children several important self-care skills. Parents did not correctly implement…

Children with autism spectrum disorder often display deficits in daily living skills. Behavior analysts can use telehealth, such as videoconferencing technology, to deliver interventions to families of these children. Given the COVID-19 pandemic and the common barriers to accessing behavioral interventions, it is imperative to evaluate the…

The Preschool Life Skills program is an intervention package designed to teach functional skills to prevent problem behavior in typically developing children. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effects of the instructional package (renamed "Life Skills") with children with developmental disabilities. The program…

Over the past decade, researchers have replicated and extended research on the preschool life skills (PLS) program developed by Hanley, Heal, Tiger, and Ingvarsson (2007). This review summarizes recent research with respect to maximizing skill acquisition, improving generality, evaluating feasibility and acceptability, and testing predictions of…

This investigation sheds light on necessary and sufficient conditions to establish self-care behavior chains among people with developmental disabilities. First, a descriptive assessment (DA) identified the types of teaching errors that occurred during self-care instruction. Second, the relative effects of three teaching errors observed during the…

Adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and no intellectual disabilities were taught to increase the social play skills of children with ASD as part of a vocational training program. Participants included 3 adults, aged 21 to 27 years, and 6 children with ASD. Probes conducted throughout the study evaluated whether play skills training affected…

In an attempt to address risk factors associated with extensive nonfamilial child care, we implemented the preschool life skills (PLS) program (Hanley, Heal, Tiger, & Ingvarsson, 2007) in two community-based Head Start classrooms. A multiple baseline design across classrooms, repeated across skills, showed that the program resulted in a 5-fold…

Two autistic children (8 and 5 years old) were paired with normal peers who, after pretraining sessions, taught community skills to the autistic children. Results demonstrated that no identified skills were acquired during baseline and modeling conditions. However, direct instruction of each child by a peer tutor resulted in learning and…

Four mentally retarded adults received single case instruction, followed by general case instruction, on washing machine and dryer use, using either actual appliances or simulation. Generalization errors were affected by single/general case instruction, not by use of simulated versus natural conditions. General case simulation was more efficient…

This study demonstrated that written specific task analyses combined with end-of-trial performance feedback were effective in promoting the acquisition and generalization of functional cleaning tasks by 11 young adults with mild disabilities. Performance transferred to natural discriminative stimuli. (Author/DB)

A task analysis model for analyzing and teaching community living skills to the mentally handicapped was developed and validated with five moderately retarded youths (ages 17 to 20 years) who were taught mending skills (sewing hems, buttons, and seams). (Author/DLS)

Prompting, modeling, and differential reinforcement were used to teach three nonverbal adults with severe to profound mental retardation to exit their group homes at the sound of the house fire alarm. All three learned to exit independently in less than two minutes in all or the majority of surprise fire drills. (Author/JDD)

Eight adults with mild disabilities were successfully taught to write checks, complete deposit slips, and reconcile monthly bank statements using a personalized system of instruction which involved a self-paced manual, progression to new material only after demonstrating mastery of previous material, and repeated testing. (Author/JDD)