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 will bring the total funds awarded by OAR to over $3.3 million since its first grants in January 2003. Starting with this preview, we will offer summaries of the newly funded research studies in The OARacle over the next few months.
Functional communication training (FCT) helps children who have little to no functional speech to effectively communicate with others. It works by first identifying the ways the children communicate that are not socially acceptable and then replacing those with socially acceptable behaviors that produce the same outcome.
However, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) who learn those new responses may use them at higher rates than their caregivers and others can support. For example, if a child learns to request attention from adults by handing them a picture symbol, he or she may use this new response every few seconds or continually across the day. Honoring the request for attention every time the child uses the response would mean the caregiver couldn’t pay attention to anything but the child, leaving no time or attention for other children or tasks.
In this OAR-funded study, Laura C. Chezan, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Communication Disorders and Special Education Department in Darden College of Education at Old Dominion University, is examining a method of conditional discrimination to teach children to wait for access to desired outcomes. For example, a child may learn to request attention every 15 minutes instead of every 15 seconds.
Conditional discrimination is defined as “emitting a response or withholding the response in the presence of different stimuli.” For example, a child may request attention when the parent is available and not request attention when the parent is talking on the phone.
To teach children who use functional communication to wait for the desired response, Dr. Chezan is using visual stimuli – a timer that will show the colors red or green — to let the children in the study know they can make a request or that they need to wait.
In her research proposal, Dr. Chezan suggests that the training has the potential to be used across settings and over time. By teaching children to wait during naturally occurring opportunities in the children’s typical environment, they will learn to wait even in situations not included in the training. Using two different stimuli, associated with specific conditions in which a response is expected, will teach the children when they can make a request and when they can’t. If a timer shows the color green, then the child can make a request. If, however, it shows red, then the child needs to wait.
The last part of the study will investigate whether the participating children can use the acquired skills across settings and occasions in the presence of novel social partners, and maintain the skills over time.
Dr. Chezan will work with four children, ages three to five, with a spoken vocabulary of fewer than five functional words. The setting will be a preschool classroom for students with autism located in a private clinic. The intervention will be implemented during naturally occurring opportunities for requests throughout the children’s typical routines.
In the first phase of the study, the children will learn to request access to reinforcement in the presence of a timer and not request reinforcement when the timer is not there.
In the second phase, the children will learn that they can request reinforcement when the timer is green but not when it’s red. Additionally, the researchers will slowly increase the amount of time the children wait for reinforcement when the timer is green to teach them to tolerate delays in reinforcement.
Once the children are able to wait for reinforcement and refrain from asking, Dr. Chezan will assess whether they can use those skills in the presence of different people, settings, and occasions. If the children can wait for reinforcement in those settings and without the timer, it will indicate that they have learned the skill.
She will test the children again at one, two, and three months after the intervention ends to see if they have maintained the ability to wait for reinforcement.
Dr. Chezan believes that the study will benefit the autism community in four ways. First, by using the intervention with children who are not currently exhibiting problem behavior, the intervention may prevent problem behavior from occurring. Learning to wait will provide children with a concrete means of monitoring for moments when they will have access to reinforcement. Having such a strategy is likely to enhance their resilience, increasing their positive interactions with people in their environment. As she notes in the proposal, “problem behavior is a significant barrier to inclusion and to a good quality of life, and thus intervening early with these children may prevent the negative outcomes associated with problem behavior.”
Second, being able to wait for reinforcement also offers them an improved quality of life, by enhancing their ability to make friends and function in school and in social settings outside of their homes. Children who can respond in socially acceptable ways rather than engaging in problem behavior, she explains, are more likely to be accepted by their peers and others. Because they will have learned a way to interact with others that provides access to desired outcomes, they may feel that they have a high level of self-determination, another indicator of quality of life.
Third, Dr. Chezan hopes that the skill can be reinforced to the point that it becomes a lasting ability. In the past, little attention has been paid to maintaining and generalizing the ability to wait for reinforcement.
Lastly, she believes that this project will provide “emerging empirical evidence of the effectiveness of conditional discrimination as a strategy to teach children to delay in reinforcement, thus enhancing the field of evidence-based instructional strategies for children with ASD.”
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