News and Knowledge

In 2014, OAR’s Board of Directors authorized funding for seven new applied autism research studies in 2015. This additional $210,000 in research grants brings the total funds awarded by OAR to over $3.3 million since its first grants in January 2003. This is the last of seven previews that have been featured in The OARacle over the last few months.

When children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) learn a new response to request something through functional communication training, they will often use that response at higher rates than caregivers can support. However, they can also learn to wait for reinforcement.

Teaching those waiting skills is the purpose of an OAR-funded study, Teaching Tolerance to Delays in Reinforcement to Children with Autism and Language Delays, being conducted by Laura C. Chezan, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Disorders & Special Education at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Va. Specifically, she is using conditional discrimination to teach young children with limited verbal skills to wait for reinforcement. She has recruited four children between the ages of 3 and 5 who have an expressive vocabulary of fewer than five functional words to participate in the study.

In her proposal, Dr. Chezan explains conditional discrimination and how it works: it is “defined as emitting a response or withholding the response in the presence of different stimuli. For example, a child may emit a request for attention when the parent is available and not emit a request for attention when the parent is talking on the phone. As a tolerance for delay strategy, conditional discrimination consists of using specific stimuli to signal when reinforcement is available.” Visual stimuli can be used to teach children when to wait, she notes. For example, pictures, cards, and drawings can be used to let a child know when he or she can ask for something or not.

Study Design

For her study, she will use opportunities that occur naturally during preschool to teach the children to wait. In the first phase of the study, she will teach the children to request access to reinforcement when there is a timer present. She and her colleagues will honor each request made by the children in the presence of a timer by providing access to reinforcement for 30 seconds. The timer will also be removed for certain periods, during which the children’s requests for reinforcement will be ignored. She anticipates that the children will learn not to request reinforcement when the timer is not present and will make a lot of requests when it is.

In the second phase of the study, she and her colleagues will teach the children to request access to reinforcement when the color green is present and not when the color red is present. They will also teach the children to tolerate delays in reinforcement even when the color green is present by gradually increasing the time between a request and delivery of reinforcement. She expects that the children will learn not to make requests in the presence of the red timer and to tolerate delays even in the presence of the green timer.

Evaluation

When the children reach those outcomes, Dr. Chezan and her colleagues will determine if the learned skills will hold even when other conditions change, such as the person implementing the procedures, the setting where the timers are used, or the type of request assessed. She anticipates that the children will not make requests when the timer is not present no matter what other conditions change.

She and her colleagues will check in with the children at one, two, and three months after the intervention ends to determine if the training has had durable and robust effects that maintain over time. They will test the children using the same methods described above.

Benefits to the Autism Community

She believes that the study findings will benefit the autism community in seven ways:

1. By teaching children to tolerate delays in reinforcement before they engage in problem behavior, the study is using a proactive approach that may prevent problem behavior from starting.
2. The intervention will teach children with ASD a collateral skill that provides them with a way to adapt to different situations and settings and still communicate effectively, which can help them function better in social settings and be more easily accepted by their peers.
3. This study, unlike others in the past, focuses not just on acquisition of the skill but also on its maintenance and generalization.
4. The study has the potential to provide empirical evidence of the effectiveness of conditional discrimination as a strategy to teach children to wait for reinforcement.
5. If the method proves effective, it will provide an evidence-based strategy for use by caregivers and practitioners, which is a critical aspect of selecting interventions when working with children with ASD and a requirement of federal mandates.
6. If the study is successful, parents and other caregivers and practitioners can use it as an effective, adaptable strategy for teaching children to wait when reinforcement is unavailable, reducing the likelihood of problem behavior and the need to implement reactive strategies to address these behaviors.
7. The strategy is easy to implement for practitioners and caregivers. It doesn’t require extensive training to implement and can be used in a child’s natural environment during daily routines.

Many parents of children with autism are concerned with the low quality of life of their children. Specifically, they report that their children are less likely to attend activities in inclusive settings, have few or no friends, and display low levels of self-esteem. Enhancing understanding of how quality of life is affected by outcomes of interventions like this one will help practitioners implement strategies and provide supports that target relevant goals promoting effective functioning in inclusive settings.