Teaching Young Children with Special Needs and Their Peers to Play Board Games: Effects of a Least to Most Prompting Procedure to Increase Independent Performance.

We investigated the effects of a least to most prompting procedure on the performance of board game steps and game-related on-task behavior of young children with special needs and their typically developing peers. This study was conducted employing a concurrent multiple baseline design across participants. After teaching the board game steps using a systematic prompting strategy, the participants demonstrated increases in the performance of board game steps and game-related on-task behavior. In addition, the participants maintained high levels of performance and game-related on-task behavior during post-game training. The effects of teaching board games using prompting strategies, implications for practice, and areas for future study are presented.

Teaching play skills to young children with autism.

BACKGROUND: Play is critical for the development of young children and is an important part of their daily routine. However, children with autism often exhibit deficits in play skills and engage in stereotypic behaviour. We reviewed studies to identify effective instructional strategies for teaching play skills to young children with autism. METHOD: Empirical studies on teaching play skills to young children with autism published from 1990 to 2011 were located. These studies included single subject and group designs. RESULTS: Twenty-six studies were reviewed. The majority of studies on teaching play skills used combined interventions. Children with autism improved their play skills, with direct intervention embedding their interests during play. Improvements in play skills increased positive social interactions and decreased inappropriate behaviour as collateral effects. CONCLUSIONS: Further research is needed to develop more effective play skill interventions that assess the functional use of play and are implemented in the natural environment.

Matrix training of preliteracy skills with preschoolers with autism.

Matrix training is a generative approach to instruction in which words are arranged in a matrix so that some multiword phrases are taught and others emerge without direct teaching. We taught 4 preschoolers with autism to follow instructions to perform action-picture combinations (e.g., circle the pepper, underline the deer). Each matrix contained 6 actions on 1 axis and 6 pictures on the other axis. We used most-to-least prompting to train the instructions along the diagonal of each matrix and probed the untrained combinations. For 2 participants, untrained responding emerged after the minimum amount of training. The other 2 participants required further training before untrained combinations emerged. At the end of the study, 3 of the 4 participants performed the trained actions with previously known pictures, letters, and numbers. This study demonstrated that matrix training is an efficient approach to teaching language and literacy skills to children with autism.