Association for Behavior Analysis International

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the school environment for millions of students in the United States and has resulted in the need to learn new behaviors, such as wearing face coverings. Learning COVID-19 prevention behaviors are especially important for students with Down syndrome. They are more likely than individuals without DS are to contract COVID-19, and they are ten times more likely to die from the disease than individuals without DS (Clift et al., 2020; Malle et al., 2020). Thus, it is essential that students with DS learn critical preventative behaviors. This study evaluated whether a behavioral intervention package including video modeling (VM; Park et al., 2019) was effective in teaching students with DS to wear face coverings using a non-concurrent multiple baseline design across three students in special education classrooms. Preliminary results show that video modeling alone was sufficient for one student. However, for the other two students, variable-momentary differential reinforcement of alternative behavior was needed to increase the time they wore face coverings. Inter-observer agreement was collected across all phases. Limitations and future research directions will be discussed.

Pre-requisite skills: knowledge of multiple baseline designs and, knowledge of video modeling as an instruction strategy.