Increasing young children's honest reports and decreasing their transgressions.

Young children break rules (i.e., transgress) and then lie about those transgressions. By adolescence, lying is associated with decreased trust, communication, and quality of relationships, and with befriending antisocial peers. To decrease lies, we replicated differentially reinforcing honest reports about transgressions for one 6-year-old neurotypical child and two 7-year-old children who were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. After all children learned to report honestly about transgressions, we extended past research to decrease transgressions by differentially reinforcing alternative play behaviors. For all children, this resulted in increased levels of play, decreased transgressions, and continued honesty about infrequent transgressions. Caregivers were satisfied with children's increased honest reports and decreased transgressions. The results support first reinforcing children's honest reports about transgressions and then decreasing transgressions to satisfying levels for caregivers.

Evaluating the generality and social acceptability of early friendship skills.

The development of prosocial skills is considered pivotal to childhood development. The friendship unit of the Preschool Life Skills program teaches early prosocial skills likely to facilitate socially desirable behaviors in young children; however, the friendship unit is the most understudied unit and has produced modest, inconsistent outcomes across children. The current study aimed to evaluate procedures necessary to (a) teach friendship skills to 4 children, with and without developmental disabilities, in an applied context and (b) promote the use of these skills with a same-aged peer. Teaching 5 friendship skills in a 1-to-1 format with the addition of tangible reinforcement, if necessary, was efficacious at increasing the children's friendship skills with an adult. Additional tactics were necessary to promote prosociality with a peer. We discuss refinements to the teaching procedures and additional considerations to improve the social acceptability and durability of prosocial skills.

Remote teaching of publication-quality, single-case graphs in Microsoft Excel.

Microsoft Excel is ubiquitous, cost-effective, and can be used to create publication-quality single-case design graphs. We systematically replicated the GraphPad Prism video tutorial by Mitteer et al. (2018) to teach 24 master's students to create multiple-baseline graphs using Excel 2016. Students' mean accuracy on the multiple-baseline graph was 25% in pretraining, 86% with the video tutorial, and 96% with the review checklist. Next, students used the same video tutorial to create multielement and reversal graphs. Students' mean accuracy on the multielement graph was 93% with video tutorial and 94% with review checklist, and accuracy on the reversal graph was 82% with video tutorial and 94% with review checklist. Students reported moderate to high satisfaction with both training components. The results support scientist-practitioners using the video tutorial and review checklists to create three common graphs using Excel 2016, Excel 2019, and Excel Office 365.

A simplified methodology for identifying the function of elopement.

Functional analyses of elopement (i.e., leaving a specific area without permission) are challenging to conduct because clients must have repeated opportunities to elope from one room (or area) to another safely. These analyses often require two or more adjoining rooms and retrieval of the client following each instance of elopement (e.g., Piazza et al., 1997). These room arrangements may be impractical in some settings, and therapist delivery of attention or demands during retrieval may confound the results. To address these issues, we evaluated the viability of conducting a functional analysis (FA) of elopement within a single room. Participants were 2 children and 2 adults with developmental disabilities who eloped from rooms at their day programs. Results of the single-room assessments were compared to those of a second FA that was conducted using methods similar to those described in previous studies. Function-based treatments were implemented for each participant. Results suggest that the single-room assessment may be a viable alternative for identifying the function of elopement.