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Individuals with developmental disabilities sometimes lack functional skills such as asking for help. Sometimes these deficits can extend into the adult years. Although there is an abundance of research on teaching such skills to children, there is a dearth of such research involving adults. Three adult participants diagnosed with disabilities that impaired independent functioning were taught to request help when needed using an electronic activity schedule using a multiple-baseline across participants design conducted in the U.S. state of New York. Each participant was given two electronic activity schedules delivered via PowerPoint on an iPad tablet. The activity schedules were based on tasks that resulted in naturally occurring reinforcers for the participants. While participants independently navigated the activity schedules and completed steps in the activities, they did not request help during steps when materials were unavailable. The addition of interactive prompts to the activity schedules increased help requests from all participants. These prompts consisted of questions with interactive choices for answers that lead to prompts to ask for help as needed. Generalization of asking for help was shown across tasks for one participant, and within tasks for two participants. The implications for continued future research on using electronic activity schedules to present choices for greater independent functioning are discussed.

Abstract The current clinical evaluation used a multiple baseline across participants design to assess the effectiveness of intraverbal training in promoting value-congruent action identification among three autistic teenagers. Participants were taught to verbally relate value-congruent actions (A) to outcomes (B), and outcomes (B) to participant-identified values (C), with tests for emergent C-A relations. Two participants demonstrated emergent value-to-action intraverbals without direct training, while one required exemplar training for partial emergence. These findings support the use of relational training to establish derived intraverbals linking values to verbal identification of value-congruent actions. The approach may be especially useful in neurodiversity-affirming clinical practice to support clients in identifying their own value-congruent actions.

ABSTRACT Engaging in regular moderate‐to‐vigorous physical activity (MVPA) can result in improvements in health in many children and adults. The United States Department of Health and Human Services (2018) recommends that adults engage in 75–150 min of MVPA and 2 days of muscle‐strengthening activities every week. Yet, many adults do not meet this recommendation and even fewer adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) meet this recommendation. Several behavioral interventions are effective in increasing MVPA, but few have targeted muscle‐strengthening activities. The purpose of this study was to evaluate goal setting and token reinforcement to increase the frequency of exercises in adults with ASD. Two adults diagnosed with ASD participated in this study at a local dance studio. Using a multiple baseline design across exercises with a changing criterion design, we used goal setting and token reinforcement to systematically increase the frequency of muscle‐strengthening exercises (e.g., pushups, bicep curls, modified squats, etc.). Both participants increased the frequency of the exercises according to the criteria changes until they met the terminal criterion for each exercise. Future directions for research and implications for practitioners were discussed.

ABSTRACT Two young men with autism and a history of dangerous behavior learned to tolerate medical procedures without escape extinction. Graduated exposure consisting of fading steps along the dimensions of distance and duration was used to teach cooperation with medical procedures that required either an anesthetic mask or an otoscope. Escape from medical procedures was concurrently available following both challenging behavior and cooperation, and verbal praise and a preferred edible were delivered contingent upon cooperation with the prescribed step. Both participants achieved the target performance in less than 40 cumulative minutes of training. This study provides further evidence that in some cases, graduated exposure without escape extinction can produce socially valid outcomes that can be maintained over time.

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Abstract Severe behavior problems (SBPs) exhibited by individuals with neurodevelopmental disabilities (NDD) can produce challenging and potentially dangerous situations. Although the field of behavior analysis has access to effective behavioral assessment and treatment methodologies, the risks associated with serving individuals with NDD engaging in SBPs remain high. Advances in wearable sensing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning offer potential support for behavior analysts working with individuals engaging in SBPs. Thus, researchers have begun studying physiological and behavioral signals (i.e., biometrics), such as heart rate or bodily motion, and their predictive relationship with SBPs. The current systematic literature review summarizes 13 peer-reviewed articles that studied predictive relations between biometrics and SBPs. We highlight commonalities, differences, and limitations among these studies. In particular, although some studies claim to predict the occurrence of SBPs over 30 s in advance of their occurrence, methodological concerns reduce the veracity of these claims. We propose short-term and long-term research questions to move this line of research forward.

ABSTRACT Functional communication training (FCT) uses a series of prompts and schedules of reinforcement to teach a socially appropriate method of communication to access a reinforcer that an interfering behavior was previously providing. Telehealth offers a platform for training professionals in FCT, providing them with the skills necessary to reduce interfering behaviors. The present study examined the use of a hybrid of telehealth and in‐person delivered behavioral skills training (BST) to teach trainees to implement FCT to address escape‐maintained interfering behaviors in children with ASD with a confederate learner. Three trainees participated in the study and received a hybrid BST package that combined in‐person and telehealth components, while incorporating instructions, modeling, rehearsal, and feedback. Following this training, trainees implemented FCT with high levels of accuracy during rehearsal sessions. These findings support further research on the use of a hybrid approach as an alternative means of delivering BST, promoting skill acquisition that is accurate, socially valid, generalizable, and maintained over time.

ABSTRACT In elementary school contexts, students may have difficulties performing at grade‐level on academic progress monitoring assessments, and these deficits may be more prevalent for students who have disabilities such as attention‐deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). For some students, their poor performance may be due to behavioral and motivational considerations and not a specific skill deficit in the skill domain, thus highlighting the need to evaluate simple, reinforcement‐based interventions that can be used to address performance issues due to behavior. In the current brief report investigation, researchers employed an AB design with embedded changing criterion components to evaluate the effects of a contextually appropriate intervention to improve performance on reading comprehension assessments for a second‐grade student receiving special education services in a rural public‐school context. The participant demonstrated an increase in accurate responding on reading comprehension assessments after implementation of the intervention and he maintained performance at or above the specified criterion throughout the intervention condition. Further, all intervention procedures were implemented by the resource and inclusion classroom teacher and the participant's performance during the intervention condition aligned with the performance of his same‐age peers.

Study objective: To examine effects and social validity of a sequential stimulus pairing (SSP) procedure for teaching reading and writing kanji charac …