The effectiveness of two extra-stimulus prompting procedures was compared in teaching receptive labels to a 3 year old autistic boy. One prompting procedure was used exclusively by the treatment center the child attended and was similar to extra-stimulus prompts used in previous studies. The procedure involved alternating unprompted trials of a…

The study compared the effectiveness of a traditional training procedure (least-to-most restrictive prompt sequence) and a prescriptive training procedure (utilizing ongoing behavioral assessment data to identify discriminative stimuli) with four severely/multiply handicapped students (ages 11-19). Results indicated both procedures were effective…

In an A-B design with replication, the efficacy of a behavioral training program for teaching two mildly retarded six-year-old children intermittent self-catheterization skills was demonstrated. Component skills were task-analyzed and trained via a graduated prompting procedure. (Author/DB)

Suggestions are given for self-operated prompting strategies to help severely handicapped students perform independently in the community, vocational, or classroom setting. Guidelines are given for developing pictorial prompts and auditory (tape recorded) prompts.(DB)

Three severely handicapped adolescents were trained, using a picture prompt package, to complete three complex vocational or daily living tasks. All students required many training sessions to learn the first training task, but generalized their use of the pictures across settings without additional training. They needed substantially reduced…

Students can learn from writing, regardless of subject area, by keeping a learning log or journal. Several types of questions and topics are suggested for the teacher to guide students in making their entries. (DCS)

Physical prompts and physical and social reinforcement within a game format helped to reduce head droop in a three-year-old congenitally visually impaired child. Generalization to untrained settings and a high level of maintenance were also revealed. (CL)

Reports two experiments examining the contents and accessibility of a subset of the knowledge represented in long-term memory by preschool-age children. The knowledge domain of object locations in the home was selected for study. Among the results, very young children revealed considerable knowledge in this domain. (Author/RH)

Reviews traditional approaches to teaching motor skills and introduces the concept of stimulus cuing, a model of attentional focus, and the importance of attentional shifting, also discussing factors that interfere with a performer's ability to focus attention and making suggestions regarding how to use attentional focusing as an effective…

This study investigated how 15 preadolescents and adolescents with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) performed on false belief tasks that included social inferencing of psychological states as well a logical inferencing of physical states. Unlike the control groups, the ASD group performed better on the social inferencing tasks and use of a prompt…

Investigated the ability of high-functioning verbal adolescents with autism or Downs Syndrome to perform a referential communication task. Findings suggest that although both groups used similar types and amounts of gesture, gesture may be used differently by persons with autism and Downs Syndrome in referential communication. (31 references)…

This paper examines behavior interventions for echolalic behavior in children with autism, including verbal prompting (focusing on the echolalic behavior itself) and the cues-pause-point procedure (which employs the child's prerequisite skills to teach correct verbal responses). A review of the literature indicated that both techniques were…

Examined young children's production of evaluative explanations in narratives of a story presented as a video sequence with no spoken dialogue. Examination of children in four age groups indicated that prompts greatly facilitated children's production of evaluatives and that they could adopt a global perspective on the story when formulating…

In two experiments we explored how learning from traditional molar worked-out examples--focusing on problem categories and their associated overall solution procedures--as well as from more efficient modular worked-out examples--where intrinsic cognitive load is reduced by breaking down complex solutions into smaller meaningful solution…

Identification of objects in a scene may be influenced by functional relations among those objects. In this study, observers indicated whether a target object matched a label. Each target was presented with a distractor object, and these were sometimes arranged to interact (as if being used together) and sometimes not to interact. When the…