Implementation of incidental teaching via professionals and caregivers to autistic children

Abstract

Applied Behavior Analysis is considered an effective, solid and promising science for the treatment of children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). There are a variety of teaching strategies aimed at this audience, including incidental teaching, which presents itself as an interesting strategy. As fundamental characteristics of this strategy, we can highlight the planning of teaching contingencies considering the child’s natural environment and the requirement of the child’s motivation as a starting point to start a teaching unit. Considering the literature in the area, there are few studies that have investigated the implementation of incidental teaching by professionals, and even rarer are the studies that have investigated the implementation of this teaching procedure by caregivers. Also, there is a need to investigate the use of incidental teaching both for mands (make an order) for an item, and for other types of mands, mand for information, for example. Considering this scenario, the objective of this study was to evaluate the implementation of incidental teaching, by professionals and caregivers, for teaching the verbal operant mand (by item and by information) to children diagnosed with ASD. Nine children, ten caregivers, and two professionals participated in this study. A baseline experimental design was used to assess the functional relationship between the implementation of teaching programs by practitioners, caregivers, and professionals, with a minimum of three times a week, and the acquisition of mand skills by item and for information by children. For this, the performance of the participants was evaluated before (baseline) and during (intervention) the implementation of the independent variable of the study (application of the teaching procedure by the applicators). From the data, it is possible to verify that before the intervention all the participants did not have the target skills in their repertoire and, as the applicators were implementing the teaching procedures, the performance accuracy of the participants was increasing until reaching maximum precision. It was also possible to verify the skill acquired by the children occurring with another different applicator of who conducted the intervention (generalization), as well as verifying the skill in the participants’ repertoire even after a month of the end of the intervention (follow-up). In addition, it was possible to verify that in the intervention carried out by professionals, an average of 5,2 teaching sessions for children to reach learning criteria, and in the intervention performed by caregivers, an average of 8,5 sessions were required. On the other hand, caregivers implemented a lower average of teaching attempts for children to acquire skills. Therefore, it is possible to conclude that the intervention conducted by both types of applicators is effective and efficient, with slight differences between them.