Using prompts to teach children with autism
Psychology Today
This Psychology Today post by Bill Ahearn, Ph. D., director of research at the New England Center for Children near Boston discusses the uses of prompts to teach children with autism. As Ahearn writes, prompts take a variety of forms – including spoken, written, pictorial and physical. And, as he notes, this is not a one-prompt-fits-all teaching approach.
Do all children learn with the same teaching procedures?
Using generic teaching procedures leaves all children behind equally.
Simply put no! Though I’m focused here on teaching children with ASDs, it is quite likely that this applies to all children in all settings. It is particularly important when working with individuals with deficits in learning to identify effective techniques for teaching skills that work for that child. Having teaching procedures that are generally effective doesn’t cut it. If we are interested in doing something other than leaving all children behind equally, we will need to catch those deficits in learning and remediate them. There are two important components to this. The first is specifically identifying the skill deficits that exist. Not acquiring a specific skill is not enough to go on. It is also necessary to assess related skills to determine the appropriate starting place. For example, when addressing communicative deficits we typically won’t start teaching a child to label objects before they can, at least at some level, express their wants, needs, and preferences. I’ll tackle assessment more extensively in another post. Secondly, we will need to identify teaching procedures that work.
Many responses are shaped up by the natural consequences that follow behavior however; when there is a skill deficit it is often necessary to prompt the critical responses and explicitly strengthen them. Prompts are usually referred to as stimuli that are effective in promoting the response in the appropriate context. For example, a child th
via Do all children learn with the same teaching procedures? | Psychology Today.
Posted on February 24, 2010 | No Comments | Category: Autism |
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