Students with intellectual and other developmental disabilities often require substantial support to acquire the skills needed to secure work experience and paid employment. Prior findings suggest that video prompting is likely to be an effective and feasible strategy for establishing such skills. To evaluate this possibility in a special…

The Preschool Life Skills program is an intervention package designed to teach functional skills to prevent problem behavior in typically developing children. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effects of the instructional package (renamed "Life Skills") with children with developmental disabilities. The program…

The Good Behavior Game (GBG) is a classroom management system that employs an interdependent group contingency, whereby students work as a team to win the game. Although previous anecdotal data have suggested that this arrangement may promote prosocial behavior, teachers may have concerns about its fairness and potential to evoke negative peer…

Previous studies have focused on whether a trial-based functional analysis (FA) yields the same outcomes as more traditional FAs, and whether interventions based on trial-based FAs can reduce socially maintained problem behavior. We included a full range of behavior functions and taught 3 teachers to conduct a trial-based FA with 3 boys with…

Studies have evaluated a range of interventions to treat food selectivity in children with autism and related developmental disabilities. The high-probability instructional sequence is one intervention with variable results in this area. We evaluated the effectiveness of a high-probability sequence using 3 presentations of a preferred food on…

One child with developmental disabilities was taught to mand for attention by saying "excuse me." Treatment effects were extended to multiple training contexts by teaching the participant to attend to naturally occurring discriminative stimuli through differential reinforcement of communication during periods of the experimenter's nonbusy…

The effectiveness of a behavioral skills training (BST) package to teach the implementation of the first three phases of the picture exchange communication system (PECS) was evaluated with 3 adults who had no history teaching any functional communication system. A multiple baseline design across participants was used to evaluate the effectiveness…

A common deficiency in the verbal repertoires of individuals with autism and related disorders is the absence of socially appropriate vocal mands. The vocal mand repertoires of these individuals may be lacking in several respects: (a) The individual might engage in no mands whatsoever, (b) the mand might be topographically dissimilar to an…

In Study 1, we examined the independent effects of reinforcer consumption during sessions and meal consumption prior to sessions on performance maintained by food reinforcement. Nine individuals with developmental disabilities participated. On alternate days, a preferred edible item was delivered during (a) seven sessions conducted before lunch…

We evaluated an outcome management program for working with staff to improve the performance of adults with severe disabilities in a congregate day-treatment setting. Initially, observations were conducted of student task involvement and staff distribution of teaching interactions across students in four program sites. Using recent normative data…

A great deal is known about the effects of positive reinforcement on response acquisition; by contrast, much less research has been conducted on contingencies applied to errors. We examined the effects of response repetition as an error-correction procedure on the sight-word reading performance of 11 adults with developmental disabilities. Study 1…

The effects of reinforcement choice on task performance were examined with six individuals (ages 6-39) who had been diagnosed with severe to profound mental retardation. Findings indicated that access to choice did not improve the task performance of the subjects when highly preferred items were already incorporated into instructional programs.…

We evaluated a staff training and management package for increasing accuracy of recording frequency of problem behavior in a residential care facility. A multiple baseline design across the first and second work shifts showed that 2 of 8 participants increased their accuracy following in-service training, and all 8 improved during a condition with…

A study evaluated teaching a technique for self-control to three adults with developmental disabilities. Concurrent fixed-duration/progressive-duration reinforcement schedules were introduced in which both smaller and larger reinforcers were available immediately. When progressively increasing delays were introduced for the larger reinforcer,…