Family Accommodation and Severe Problem Behavior: Considering Family-Based Interventions to Expand Function-Based Treatment.

Family involvement in routines that exacerbate and maintain child anxiety is referred to as family accommodation. Family involvement is also related to maintenance of severe problem behavior (SPB) demonstrated by children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). Family members may deliver attention, tangible items, or remove aversive task demands that produce temporary cessation, or avoidance of SPB, but long-term maintenance. This Clinical Perspectives article describes parallels between the treatment of family accommodation in child anxiety and the assessment and treatment process for SPB. Suggestions are described for borrowing the concept of family accommodation to help caregivers of children who demonstrate SPB begin to approach previously avoided contexts. A case vignette is provided to illustrate strategies for targeting family accommodation as an expansion of function-based treatments for SPB.

Use of a Modified Chaining Procedure with Textual Prompts to Establish Intraverbal Storytelling.

Echoic, tact, and textual transfer procedures have been proven successful in establishing simple intraverbals (Braam and Poling Applied Research in Mental Retardation, 4, 279-302, 1983; Luciano Applied Research in Mental Retardation, 102, 346-357, 1986; Watkins et al. The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, 7, 69-81, 1989). However, these strategies may be ineffective for some children due to the complexity of the targeted intraverbals. The current study investigated the use of a novel procedure which included a modified chaining procedure and textual prompts to establish intraverbal behavior in the form of telling short stories. Visual prompts and rule statements were used with some of the participants in order to produce the desired behavior change. Results indicated that the procedure was effective for teaching retelling of short stories in three children with autism.

Peer-mediated check-in/check-out for students at-risk for internalizing disorders.

The present study investigated the effectiveness of peer-mediated check-in/check-out (CICO) on the internalizing behaviors of elementary school students. A nonconcurrent multiple-baseline design across participants was utilized to evaluate the intervention's effectiveness for 3 students in 1st and 2nd grade. Two 5th grade students were trained to implement CICO under the supervision of an adult intervention specialist. The peer-mediated CICO procedure was effective for 2 of the 3 participants as evidenced by moderate to large effect sizes; however, all 3 participants were identified as "at-risk" on a universal screener for internalizing problems. The results suggest peer-mediated CICO may be a resource-efficient Tier II strategy to meet the needs of students engaging in internalizing behavior within a multitiered framework of service delivery.