Teaching a child with autism to request help only when needed
ISSN: 2056-3868
Article publication date: 25 June 2021
Issue publication date: 3 January 2022
Abstract
Purpose
Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) or other developmental disabilities are often reported to have challenges in well generalizing the newly learned communicative skills such as requesting help. Not requesting help when it is needed can hinder engagement and learning, whereas requesting help could also be socially inappropriate. This paper aims to offer a demonstration of applying general case instruction to teach a young child diagnosed with ASD to request help only when needed while concurrently increasing the child’s independence in task completion.
Design/methodology/approach
The demonstration adopted within-participant AB designs for one 5-year-old boy with ASD, with data collected across three tasks targeted for intervention and the other three tasks targeted for generalization probes throughout both the baseline and intervention phases. Dependent measures consisted of independent help request and independent task completion. Visual analysis was used to describe the results.
Findings
Results showed that the child with ASD learned to ask for help on difficult educational activities, while concurrently increasing his independence on these tasks; generalized the skill of requesting help by asking for help when he encountered other challenging novel tasks; and independently completed easy educational activities without requesting help.
Originality/value
The findings from this study may add to the limited literature that explored the generalization performance across tasks/activities in young learners with ASD, while demonstrating the feasibility of designing and applying general case instruction framework to enhance generalization performance for one individual learner.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The first author would like to gratefully acknowledge Joe Reichle for his help during the preparation and implementation of this study.Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this paper.Compliance with Ethical Standards: All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent and assent were obtained from the participant included in the study.
Citation
Chen, M., Kreibich, S. and Hyppa-Martin, J. (2022), "Teaching a child with autism to request help only when needed", Advances in Autism, Vol. 8 No. 1, pp. 60-70. https://doi.org/10.1108/AIA-09-2020-0052
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited