Association for Behavior Analysis International

When providing ABA services for learners with autism spectrum disorder, it is crucial that clinicians identify not only effective, but efficient teaching procedures. Procedures that result in rapid acquisition of instructional targets or promote generative learning to untaught targets may be particularly helpful in this aim. Such procedures can involve manipulation of antecedent and/or consequent components of instructional protocols (e.g., prompts, reinforcement, or secondary stimuli). This symposium will present research that evaluates the effects of various antecedent and consequent strategies that aim to improve instructional efficiency across a range of skill domains for learners with autism spectrum disorder. Presenters will discuss extra-stimulus versus within-stimulus prompts and differential outcomes procedure to teach conditional discriminations, and antecedent and consequent instructive feedback to teach tacts and intraverbals. Presenters will discuss clinical implications of the findings, including potential benefits and barriers to using the procedures in practice, as well as areas for future research.

At least BCBA-level clinicians and researchers; graduate students

Effective and efficient skill-acquisition procedures must be identified to support individualized behavioral programming for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). To do this, practitioners and researchers may use assessment-based instruction. Prompts are a common teaching strategy to promote skill acquisition. The purpose of this applied study was to use assessment-based instruction to evaluate the efficacy and efficiency of digital within- and extra-stimulus prompts to teach conditional discriminations to three children with ASD. We identified stimulus prompts using a survey of popular children’s games and conducted a tablet-based instruction readiness assessment. Stimulus prompts involved motion (within-stimulus) and pointing (extra-stimulus) to evoke correct responses in the presence of the discriminative stimulus. We used an adapted alternating treatments design with a no-treatment control condition to evaluate the effects of both prompt types across multiple sets of stimuli. Both stimulus prompt types were efficacious in facilitating skill acquisition for two of three participants. Little difference was observed in time to mastery with either prompt. Neither stimulus prompt was efficacious for the third participant. Assessment results were used to inform clinical programming to teach conditional discriminations to participants and contribute to research on designing and implementing assessments of skill-acquisition procedures.

Research has demonstrated the utility of instructive feedback (IF) as a method to produce emergent verbal behavior. Instructive feedback is a teaching strategy in which nontarget stimuli are presented in learning trials to increase the efficiency of instruction (Carroll & Kodak, 2015). Researchers have investigated differences in secondary target acquisition when inserting the secondary targets in different configurations of the learning trial (e.g., antecedent, consequence). Findings have shown minimal differences in efficacy irrespective of the configuration (e.g., Vladescu & Kodak, 2013). However, no studies to date have evaluated participants’ preference for feedback delivery. As such, the current study replicated previous research by comparing the efficacy and efficiency of IF when presented as antecedent or consequence feedback and included a preference measure for feedback delivery for two children with autism spectrum disorder. We included some procedural modifications such as incorporating probes throughout intervention to attempt to determine when secondary targets were acquired and measured participants’ echoic behavior to evaluate its role in the emergence of the secondary targets. Finally, we tested for the emergence of novel intraverbal responses following secondary-target acquisition. We discuss the clinical implications of our results related to past research, emergent verbal behavior, and participant choice.