Normal children as tutors to teach social responses to withdrawn mentally retarded schoolmates: training, maintenance, and generalization

Including a Student with Multiple Disabilities and Visual Impairment in Her Neighborhood School

This article begins with a literature review of main-streaming students with multiple disabilities and visual impairment in general schools, stressing the importance of opportunities for peer interaction that are prevalent in regular settings. It then describes a program carried out with a 5-year-old student attending her neighborhood school in Auckland, New Zealand. Comments of the people involved in the program, including the principal, the teachers, the teacher's aide, family members, and fellow pupils, are reported, and the success of the program is discussed.

A Comparison of the Effects of Teacher and Peer Supervision on Work Performance and On-Task Behavior

This study evaluated the effectiveness of teacher and peer supervision in increasing levels of on-task behavior and work performance in a prevocational setting. Six severely retarded individuals served as subjects and were assigned an assembly task. Results indicated that close supervision by either a teacher or peer was superior to the baseline condition. In addition, results showed that peer supervision produced higher levels of on-task behavior among subjects than did teacher supervision. It was suggested that delegating some student supervisory responsibilities permits a teacher to use instructional time more efficiently and affords the supervising peer an opportunity to learn valuable work-related skills.

Acquisition of Conversation Skills and the Reduction of Inappropriate Social Interaction Behaviors

Three students with severe disabilities were taught to independently initiate a conversation and participate in conversation turntaking throughout a 10-min session across a variety of school and community settings with at least four nondisabled peers as partners. Inappropriate social interaction behaviors that were present at high rates during baseline sessions were observed to decrease as conversation skills were acquired. This finding is discussed in terms of the hypothesis that inappropriate behaviors can serve a variety of communicative functions and may be reduced as functionally equivalent, socially acceptable communication means are acquired.

Training and generalization of affective behavior displayed by youth with autism

The purpose of this study was to teach contextually appropriate affective behavior to 4 youths with autism. Treatment consisted of modeling, prompting, and reinforcement introduced in a multiple baseline design across response categories of affective behavior. During treatment, verbal praise and tokens were delivered contingent on appropriate affective responding during training trials. Modeling and verbal prompting were used as correction procedures. Each youth received treatment in either three or four response categories. Treatment systematically increased responding within the response categories for all 4 participants, with effects being specific to the affective response categories under treatment. Treatment effects occurred across untrained scenarios, therapists, time, and settings, suggesting that generalization had occurred.

Strategies and tactics for promoting generalization and maintenance of young children's social behavior

Employing a conceptual framework of generalization strategies proposed by Stokes and Osnes (1986), the authors selectively reviewed the research literature concerning interventions to improve young children's social behavior and strategies for promoting generalization and maintenance of young children's social responding. Three basic strategies are discussed: (a) taking advantage of natural communities of reinforcement, (b) training diversely, and (c) incorporating functional mediators, along with several accompanying tactics, to improve children's social interactions. Pragmatic recommendations for proactive programming of generalization and maintenance of young children's social behavior are included. In addition, the authors argue for the continued development of a technology (or technologies) of generalization and maintenance for young children's social competence interventions.

Assessing and enhancing generalization and social validity of social-skills interventions with children and adolescents

Generalization and social validity are necessary aspects of any applied behavior analytic endeavor. They are especially critical to social-skills training research and practice. Investigators have demonstrated the effectiveness of various learning theory-based interventions in teaching social skills to and increasing peer interactions of children with and without disabilities. However, development of a technology for reliably transferring these changes across different situations or ensuring their persistence over time has proven to be more problematic. From both a conceptual and empirical standpoint, this article reviews progress in and barriers to assessing and enhancing generality of social behavior change and its relationship to social validity. If progress is to be made, then it will be necessary to (a) distinguish between generalization and generality in developing and evaluating social-skills interventions; (b) expand the concept of social validity to give more emphasis to objective measurement of social skills, interventions, and outcomes; and (c) pursue a systematic analysis of generality- and durability-programming tactics.

Increasing generalized social interactions in psychotic and mentally retarded residents through peer-mediated therapy

This study investigated whether withdrawn adults living in a residential center for psychotic and mentally handicapped persons could serve as peer therapists to increase the social interaction of other withdrawn residents. Two pairs of residents served as participants. Treatments were introduced and evaluated within a multiple baseline with reversal design. After baseline, the peer therapist was instructed to increase the social interactions of a target peer through engagement in social interactions. The results demonstrated that the peer therapist increased the social interactions of target peers. However, these increases did not generalize to other residents until the introduction of a multiple peer therapist condition. The percentage of time the peer therapists interacted with other nontarget residents also increased throughout the study. These results were maintained during a 4-month follow-up condition.

Setting generality of peer modeling in children with autism

Behavior development in normal children is greatly facilitated by peer modeling. Unfortunately, autistic children do not typically imitate their normal peers. The present study was undertaken to identify variables that facilitate the acquisition of peer imitation and promote setting generality of imitative skills once they have been acquired. We selected a common preschool activity (Follow-the-Leader) as the vehicle for studying modeling effects. Four preschool children with autism took part in an intervention in which a normal peer demonstrated and, if necessary, physically prompted a variety of actions and object manipulations that defined the activity. Following training, all four children generalized their imitative skill to a new setting involving new actions and object manipulations. Results are discussed with respect to the potentially important role that the use of multiple training objects and/or responses play in enhancing attention to the model and facilitating setting generality as well as the role that intrinsically reinforcing activities may play in maintaining acquired peer imitation.

A peer-mediated intervention with clinic-referred socially isolated girls. Generalization, maintenance, and social validation

Peer-mediated interventions have been widely employed with seriously impaired autistic and handicapped children to modify social withdrawal. This study extends the literature by examining the impact of a peer intervention on the interactions of developmentally normal, socially isolated girls. Two to three actual classroom peers were trained to serve as helpers to initiate and maintain interactions with the subjects. The intervention was introduced sequentially across 2 girls in a multiple-baseline design, and a within-subject ABA withdrawal design was used to assess maintenance. Behavioral observations during recess periods indicated that both children's positive social interactions with peer helpers and other classmates were increased significantly during intervention and were maintained in return-to-baseline conditions and at 4-month follow-up. Increases in positive social interactions of both subjects generalized to a second recess setting, in which intervention was not introduced. Subjects' interactions in both recess settings reached levels comparable to those of social-comparison groups of peers. Teacher and self-report ratings suggested that both girls had fewer social problems and experienced less loneliness and dysphoria as a result of the intervention.

Teaching social language to moderately handicapped students

Three students with moderate handicaps were taught to initiate and expand on conversational topics. The teaching procedure used stimuli generated from actual conversations with nonhandicapped peers. Generalization was assessed by audiotaping conversations between the handicapped students and their peers in natural school contexts without adult supervision. Results indicated that training generalized to natural contexts. These results were socially validated by undergraduate special education students, who rated tapes of two of the students' conversations during training phases as more socially competent than during baseline. Results are discussed in terms of the evaluation of complex social behavior as multioperant behaviors.

Influence of self-monitoring on heterosexual conversational behaviors of head trauma youth

This study evaluates the impact of self-monitoring on three heterosexual conversational behaviors of head trauma youths. Two 5-minute audiotaped conversations occurred daily between the youths and unfamiliar female confederates. Two conversations occurring on alternate days in clinical and natural conversational settings were scored for the frequency of compliments, questions, and self-disclosures. A multiple baseline analysis with alternating treatments for "instructions to self-monitor" and "no instructions to self-monitor" revealed (a) self-monitoring had an accelerative effect on compliments and questions and a decelerative effect on self-disclosure; (b) self-monitoring effects were maintained despite transferring from a mechanical counter to an unspecified covert monitoring procedure; (c) self-monitoring had a comparable effect whether employed in a clinical or functional communication setting; (d) performance of the target behavior was most strongly influenced under the "instructions to self-monitor condition;" (e) once intervention was directed to another response, the rate under the instructions and no instruction conditions became equivalent; and (f) the results maintained over a 1-month follow-up for one youth available for observation. Finally, social comparison and subjective evaluation data supported the importance of intervention.

Peer-mediated approaches to promoting children's social interaction: a review

The literature on peer-mediated treatment approaches is reviewed, and three types of peer-mediated treatment--proximity, prompt/reinforce, and peer initiation interventions--are identified. The relative efficacy of these interventions is examined, treatment issues are discussed, and directions for future research are considered.

Effects of feedback and self-monitoring on head trauma youths' conversation skills

The effects of feedback and self-recording on the small group conversational behaviors of two head trauma youths were evaluated. Feedback involved providing clients a light signal corresponding to positive or negative social interactions. The self-monitoring procedure required that the clients flip a switch corresponding with their positive or negative interactions. An A1-B1-C1-A2-C2-B2 design in which the feedback phase (B) and self-monitoring phase (C) were alternated to control for order effects demonstrated the efficacy of both interventions. Performance gains were also shown to generalize to less structured situations, bringing the clients' level of positive responses into a range established with a social comparison group.

Training mildly handicapped peers to facilitate changes in the social interaction skills of autistic children

We evaluated the effects of a peer-training strategy, consisting of direct prompting and modeling, on the occurrence and duration of interactions between autistic students and nonautistic peer-trainers. Data were obtained in both training and generalization settings. The results of a multiple-baseline design across students demonstrated that:the direct prompting procedure produced immediate and substantial increases in the occurrences and durations of positive social interactions between the peer-trainers and autistic students; these increases were maintained across time at levels above baseline during subsequent free-play probes; these findings were judged by teachers to be socially valid; untrained peers increased their interactions with the autistic students in three of the four groups; generalization of behavior change across settings occurred only after specific programming; and interactions between untrained peers and peer-trainers decreased following training. Variables that may account for the results and the implications of these findings for peer-mediated interventions are discussed.