Previous research has shown that children with autism often have deficits in deception, both in the ability to lie to others and in the ability to detect when they are being lied to. Additionally, children with autism are frequently the victims of bullying and difficulty with understanding deception likely makes the population more vulnerable to…

Instructive feedback (IF) is a teaching strategy in which extra information is presented to a student during teaching trials for other target skills. Research has shown that when IF is utilized with students with disabilities, they acquire additional skills without additional instructional time (fewer trials and sessions), resulting in more…

Researchers have shown that children with autism have difficulty with non-literal language, such as irony, sarcasm, deception, humor, and metaphors. To date, few studies have attempted to remediate these deficits, and no studies of which we are aware have attempted to teach children with autism to understand metaphors. Metaphorical reasoning…

Whilst impairments in joint attention, imitation, and pretend play are well documented in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the developmental trajectories of these symptoms remain unknown. The main objective was to explore these trajectories in a sample of children at risk for ASD between the ages of 2 and 4 years. After screening…

We examined the emergence of listener responses following intraverbal training in four children with autism. Intraverbal training consisted of a transfer-of-control procedure in which the participants were taught to answer questions in the form of "What is the state bird of [name of state]" using either picture prompts (tact-to-intraverbal…

The Barnet Early Autism Model (BEAM) for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) was compared to a time-comparable approach (Portage) in terms of child outcomes and parental functioning. BEAM produced improvements in the adaptive behavioural function and language abilities of the children with ASD. Additionally, the programme produced…

Question asking behavior, or requesting information, is often deficient in children with autism and can prove challenging to teach. Currently, there exists a paucity of research regarding the types of teaching strategies that are effective in teaching children with autism this crucial skill. The purpose of the present study was to examine…

Treatment implementation is an under-studied and under-reported aspect of intervention studies involving individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). One primary area of concern is the lack of reliable and valid implementation measures, which allows a conclusive association to be drawn between the intervention and participant outcomes. This…

In general terms a mand is a requesting response. Teaching children with autism to mand for information is often a difficult task given their language deficits. The present study examined a procedure consisting of contrived motivating operations, prompt fading, manded consequences, error correction, and a brief preference assessment for teaching…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of peer- and sibling-assisted learning on interaction behaviors and aquatic skills in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Outcome measures were also examined in their typically developing (TD) peers/siblings. Twenty-one children with ASD and 21 TD children were assigned in three groups:…

We investigated the extent to which mands for information taught using structured teaching trials (i.e., verbal discriminative stimulus, verbal prompts, and programmed consequences) while contriving the establishing operations to young children with autism generalized to novel stimuli and settings. Three students with autism participated in this…

Computer-assisted instruction (CAI) is used to teach a variety of skills to children with developmental disabilities. However, it remains unclear whether CAI or direct instruction from a therapist produces better learning outcomes. In addition, no studies have evaluated the ease of training therapists to implement CAI versus direct instruction. In…

Although the demand for training individuals to implement discrete-trials teaching (DTT) is high, published studies on strategies to do so are few. We used a modified multiple-baseline design across participants to evaluate a training package for teaching university students to implement a 19-component DTT procedure to teach three tasks to a…

Video modeling has been found to be an effective procedure for teaching a variety of skills to persons with autism, however, some individuals do not learn through video instruction. The purpose of the current investigation was to teach children with autism, who initially did not imitate a video model, to construct three toy structures through the…

Children with autism spectrum disorders sometimes are fully included in regular education classrooms with its standard curriculum and instructional methods. Under these classroom conditions, the children might perform successfully for some academic subjects but not for others. For these latter academic subjects, standard instruction could be…