Parent training: Acquisition and generalization of discrete trials teaching skills with parents of children with autism
Section snippets
Participants and setting
Participants were two mothers of children with autism; Melissa had two children, Jina had one child. Both mothers were married to their children's biological father and described themselves as “homemakers”. Both were high school graduates, and had received some higher education. Melissa's son, Jason, was 4 years old and diagnosed with autism and severe mental retardation. Jina's son, Nevin, was 4 years old and diagnosed with autism. Both boys had documented deficits in language/communication
Parent behaviors
Fig. 1, Fig. 2 display data on the acquisition and generalization of DTT procedures for the two parents, Melissa and Jina. Fig. 1 displays the percent of correct teaching by trial for Melissa, extending across the child skills of attending, writing, counting and indicating preference (choosing). During baseline, Melissa's correct use of DTT across all child-skills averaged 5% (range, 1–9%). Following parent training, her correct use of DTT for “attending” (top panel) increased immediately, from
Discussion
Results of this study demonstrate that two parents were able to acquire a well-defined set of behaviors for teaching their children with autism. This study adds to previous findings in the parent training literature by providing repeated-measures data on the generality of parent learning. Both parents improved their teaching across child skills before receiving training on all child skills, although this effect required fewer exemplars and was more striking with Jina than with Melissa. Our
Acknowledgements
This study was completed as partial fulfillment for the Masters of Science degree for the first author. The authors would like to thank Karen Green and Cristian Cox for their assistance in data collection and analysis. The authors would also like to thank Samera Baird and Jim Johnston for their service as thesis committee members.
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- 1
Present address: University of Massachusetts Medical School and The Shriver Center, Waltham, MA, USA.
- 2
Present address: Illinois State University, Normal, IL, USA.