The Autism Society Event and Education Recordings Archive

There are a variety of ways to teach skills to children with ASD such as forward chaining, backward chaining and total task presentation. Typically, acquisition trials are organized by breaking the chain into teachable units, thus task analyzing the chain. This session will begin by reviewing current best practices for teaching behavior chains such as activities of daily living and play skills. It will further focus on reviewing case studies involving teaching children with ASD to brush their teeth independently. One critical aspect of delivering effective instruction to children and adults with autism and related developmental disabilities is breaking down complex skills into their component parts.  This provides a systematic approach to teaching complex skills by providing instruction on simpler components of the skill.  This also allows specific tailoring of teaching procedures to match the learning style of each individual. Most complex skills are behavior chains.  Behavior chains consist of a sequence of related responses.  Teaching behavior chains through task analysis involves providing instruction by prompting responses in a systematic fashion.  This teaching procedure fosters putting the component skills or steps into their proper order of occurrence.  This sequence of instruction results in each response or step in the chain producing a change in the environment that sets up the next step in the sequence and which reinforces the response that precedes it.  Each response comes to serve as both a reinforced response and the cue or discriminative stimulus for the next response in the chain.  There are a variety of ways to teach behavior chains such as forward chaining, backward chaining and total task presentation.  Typically, acquisition trials are organized by breaking the chain into teachable units, thus task analyzing the chain.  Task analyses have been widely used to teach many different skills.  Cuvo, Leaf, and Barakove (1978) taught janitorial skills to participants with mental retardation.  Additional vocational skills such as table setting, calculator use, and putting together carburetors have also been taught at various vocational sites using task analyses (Walls, Crist, Sienicki, & Grant, 1981; Walls, Zane, & Ellis, 1981).  Other work with individuals diagnosed with mental retardation has focused on teaching self-help skills such as shoe tying, tooth brushing, hair combing, and string tying (Glendenning, Adams, & Sternberg, 1983; Matson, Taras, Sevin, Love, & Fridley, 1990).  Teachers who work with individuals with severe cognitive deficits are especially challenged to increase behavioral repertoires.  In many cases, teachers use prompts associated with the response, such as verbal cues, modeling, or physical assistance, to increase the chances that a specific response would occur, and therefore meet reinforcing consequences (Billingsley & Romer, 1983; as cited in Demchak, 1990).
    This session will begin by reviewing current best practices for teaching behavior chains using task analyses with a particular focus on the areas of response prompting procedures (e.g., errorless prompting, trial-and-error, and delayed cueing), how to teach untrained steps (e.g., modeling untrained steps or prompting the learner through the untrained steps), and determining the optimal number of teachers for implementing the curriculum (i.e., the effects of using a limited number of teachers relative to learning across a variety of teachers).  This session will also address critical components of task analysis to facilitate design of effective curriculum.  
    One example that will be focused on is tooth brushing.  Tooth brushing is an important skill for increasing independence among children with ASD. Many children often struggle to gain independence with tooth brushing. One part of this session will involve a presentation that will describe three teaching procedures for training children with ASD to brush their teeth. The first case study describes the use of frequent training sessions and a modified task analysis, one that isolates a few steps from the total sequence to be taught. The second case study evaluates whether isolating skill deficits prior to training tooth brushing sequence would be helpful.  Skill deficits identified were problems of fine motor and the occurrence of incompatible behavior. The third case study evaluates the utility of video modeling for teaching tooth brushing.

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