Five adults with severe handicaps were taught leisure skills using two instructional prompt-fading procedures. Increasing assistance and graduated guidance were found to be equivalent in instructional time to criterion. Increasing assistance required fewer trials to criterion, but resulted in a larger percentage of errors to criterion than…

Four preschool children with autism played "Follow-the-Leader," in which a normal peer demonstrated and physically prompted a variety of actions and object manipulations that defined the activity. Following training, all four subjects generalized their imitative skill to a new setting involving new actions and object manipulations. (Author/JDD)

Six persons, ages 17-20, with moderate mental retardation were taught to identify 3 words by each of 2 different procedures--a fading procedure called the Task Demonstration Model and the Standard Prompting Hierarchy. The Task Demonstration Model produced fewer errors in acquisition, generalization, and maintenance. (Author/JDD)

A cognitive, nonintrusive method of controlling head-rocking behavior in an 11-year-old blind subject involved having the boy place his hand on his cheek or chin when prompted that he was rocking his head. The subject demonstrated significant decreases in head rocking during intervention and generalization during followup. (Author/JDD)

Students (grades 7-8) with and without learning disabilities (LD) wrote stories for which a beginning, middle, end, or no prompt was given. Results indicated differences between groups in quantity and quality of story production. LD subjects scored significantly lower when offered the middle prompt than other prompts, perhaps because of their…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of the constant time delay procedure, while comparing the efficiency of using teacher-selected and student-selected material prompts, in teaching multiplication facts to 4 male students with learning disabilities (ages 9 to 13). Results indicated that the time delay procedure was most efficient when students…

Evaluation of a self-operated auditory prompting system with four adolescents with moderate or severe mental handicaps found the students could successfully use the system in learning a task in one setting and could generalize use of the prompting system to the same task in another setting and to a somewhat different task in the original setting.…

A 10-year-old autistic child was trained to imitate verbal prompts describing the child's motor responses. When intervention was introduced in the form of a gradual delay in the presentation of the verbal prompts, the child's spontaneous speech on trained items increased. Generalization and maintenance were analyzed. (Author/JDD)

The use of a self-operated auditory prompting system by a 12-year-old student with autism and moderate mental retardation to decrease inappropriate and off-task behavior was examined. Results indicated a significant decrease in the number of teacher-delivered prompts required by the student to engage in appropriate behaviors and remain on task.…

A study found simultaneous prompting procedures were effective in teaching environmental word identification to five students (ages 6-11) with moderate intellectual disabilities and that they were able to acquire additional instructive feedback stimuli presented on either a continuous or an intermittent presentation schedule, regardless of…

Investigates the extent to which the use of a prompting statement can increase reports of pretreatment change. Results reveal that hearing a prompting statement did not increase the amount of pretreatment change for participants in the experimental condition. Those participants who did not hear the prompting statement reported greater pretreatment…

Three adults with severe disabilities received instructional support to make purchases in fast food restaurants. During intervention, participants were prompted to make five distinct choices during the community routine. This prompting resulted not only in increased choice making, but also in collateral increases in the performance of the…

In three experiments, students received a short science lesson on how airplanes achieve lift and then were asked to write an explanation (retention test) and solutions to five problems (transfer test). For some students, the lesson contained signals such as section headings and pointer words. Students given signals generated significantly more…

Educational interventions based on the principles of behavior analysis are highly effective for establishing skills in young children with autism. As a first step in program development, the child's current skill level is determined by evaluating performance on tasks drawn from a preestablished curriculum. However, few specific guidelines have…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effectiveness of most to least prompting on teaching pedestrian skills to individuals with developmental disabilities. Five individuals with developmental disabilities were taught three different pedestrian skills, all related to crossing the streets, using simulation activities on a road model…