News and Knowledge

Summary: Taylor and colleagues choose to address the issue of personal safety and learners with autism by investigating the efficacy of an instructional protocol designed to teach adolescent learners to seek help when lost. The students who participated in the study were three adolescents (two females; one male) with a previously established diagnosis of autism enrolled in the Alpine Learning Group in New Jersey. Following baseline, students were taught to respond to a vibrating pager by giving a familiar person (in the school context) a card that stated the person’s name, a statement that he or she was lost and a request to call or page the person’s teacher. Step II in this process involved a similar process but outside of the school and in the community, which was subsequently generalized to an alone condition and the card being given to an unfamiliar adult. Subsequently, all participants learned to produce the card in response to the vibrating pager in both environments and, importantly, were able to do so with their parents. The authors note that the “results of this study are promising and suggest possible strategies for ensuring the public safety of individuals with autism.” Further, the potential for technological advances to help support the independence and safety of learners on the spectrum is noted here and, with the possible exception of augmented communication systems, remains a topic with, unfortunately, limited research.

References

Taylor, B.A., Hughes, C.E., Richard, E., Hoch, H., Coello, A.R., (2004). Teaching teenagers with autism to seek assistance when lost. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 37, 79-82.