Association for Behavior Analysis International

We studied the effects of implementing an Instructional Readiness procedure to increase compliance and decrease problem behaviour during treatment sessions. Participant A was a 17-year-old male with ASD who functioned at an emergent listener-emergent speaker level of Verbal Behaviour Participant B was a 31-year-old male with ASD and intellectual disability who had a listener-speaker level of Verbal Behavior (Greer & Ross, 2016). Prior to the study, Participant A showed severe physical stiffness and high response latency during instruction, and therefore needed individualized teaching with visual and gestural prompts to perform self-help tasks. Participant B showed severe verbal and physical aggression toward others and against objects and furniture, across different settings. The design for this study was pre-post probe across participants. The dependent variables were total number of Learn Units, Learn Units to criterion rate, response rate, independent performance of basic self-help and self-management task sequences for Participant A; number of vocal and physical aggressions during instruction and free time for Participant B. During the intervention, all other programs were placed on hold. The first post probe data showed a significant increase in the percentage of responses related to the acquisition of life autonomies, an increase in the number of total Learn Units, response rate, and a decrease in the number of Learn Units to Criterion for the Participant A. Data showed that the Instructional Readiness procedure drastically decreased both participants’ problem behavior in all settings. Following the implementation of this intervention, Participant A was placed in an educational context with four other teenagers and successfully started an “independent life” residency program within the public school and health system. Following the study, A successfully started a residency program with four other teenagers and B was fully included in his family everyday life and events. These preliminary data are encouraging and suggest that Instructional Readiness can be a useful tool to increase response fluency, appropriate behavior and learning rate for teen-agers and adults who couldn’t experience social inclusion because of their problem behavior.