Many individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have deficits in conversation skills that can interfere with the development of personal and professional relationships. Further research is needed on efficient interventions for targeting conversation skills in adults with ASD and for evaluating the social validity of the outcomes. In this…

Pyramidal training may offer an efficient approach for disseminating behavior analytic teaching practices into public schools serving students with autism. In this study, we evaluated 16 teachers' use of behavioral skills training (BST) while they trained paraprofessionals to use discrete-trial teaching (DTT). All paraprofessionals demonstrated…

We compared two prompting techniques that are commonly used to teach individuals with autism. In the "most-to-least" (MTL) prompting condition, the therapist initially delivered the most intrusive prompt necessary to achieve a correct response. Prompts were gradually faded across subsequent trials, while errors resulted in the provision of…

Recording the antecedents and consequences of problem behavior for the purposes of conducting descriptive analyses (called "A-B-C recording") can be particularly challenging, given the multiple variables that are commonly present in the natural environment. Nonetheless, psychologists and behavioral consultants often must rely on parents and…

The efficacy of guided compliance and high-probability instructional sequences was compared with two young children with disabilities and noncompliant behavior. Levels of compliance were higher under guided compliance than under high-probability instructional sequences. Parents were able to learn to implement treatments accurately and reported…