ARTICLES
Errorless Academic Compliance Training: Improving Generalized Cooperation With Parental Requests in Children With Autism

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ABSTRACT

Objective

Children with autism often demonstrate distress and oppositionality when exposed to requests to complete academic or household tasks. Errorless academic compliance training is a success-focused, noncoercive intervention for improving child cooperation with such activities. In the present study, the authors evaluated treatment and generalization effects of this intervention on four children diagnosed with autism.

Method

In a multiple baseline across-subjects design, parents delivered a range of academic and nonacademic requests to their children to determine the probability of compliance for each request. A hierarchy of academic requests ranging from those yielding high compliance (level 1) to those yielding low compliance (level 4) was then developed. Treatment began with the concentrated delivery of level 1 requests, with praise and reward for compliant responses. Over several weeks, children were gradually introduced to requests from subsequent probability levels with continued reward for compliance.

Results

High compliance levels were demonstrated throughout and following treatment. Evidence of generalization to untrained academic requests and nonacademic requests emerged. Treatment gains were maintained up to 6 months after treatment.

Conclusions

Errorless academic compliance training appears to be an effective intervention for enhancing generalized compliance in children with autism.

Section snippets

Participants and Setting

Participant children were referred to a community health care agency in Ontario that provided treatment for children with developmental disabilities. Five families initiated intervention. One family withdrew shortly after beginning baseline observations due to demands unrelated to the project. The four remaining children engaged in destructive, oppositional, or disruptive behavior in both academic and general demand situations.

Child 1 was a 42-month-old boy who was diagnosed with autism by a

Baseline

Figure 1 depicts time-series observational data for child compliance to academic requests across baseline and treatment phases for each child. Baseline data points on this graph represent percentage of child compliance to level 4 academic requests only, as these requests were the primary focus of the intervention (see also Ducharme et al., 2000, Ducharme et al., 2001, 2002). The mean probability of compliance across the four children during baseline was 88% for level 1 requests, 71% for level 2

DISCUSSION

In the present study, we examined whether a variation of errorless compliance training that focused on academic/tabletop requests would produce significant increases in compliance to these requests for children with autism. In addition, we evaluated generalization to nontreatment academic requests and to nonacademic general requests following intervention.

The findings indicated that errorless academic compliance training was associated with substantial improvements in child compliance to

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  • Cited by (24)

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    The authors thank Leanne Baldwin and the staff of Peel Behavioural Services, Trillium Health Centre, for support of this research.

    All parents provided written consent for publication.

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