Teaching Young Children to Make Bids to Play to Peers With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Peer-mediated intervention (PMI) within the inclusive early childhood setting increases social exposure between children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing peers. However, PMI research to date has provided limited data on the adherence of strategies taught to typically developing peers during training. The present study examined the extent to which a packaged intervention consisting of video modeling (VM) was an effective tool to promote bids to play by typically developing peers to children with ASD during unstructured indoor and outdoor play. A multiple probe across participants design demonstrated that (a) all three typically developing peers learned to invite children with ASD to play after observing video models and (b) children with ASD increased independent responses to initiations with least-to-most prompting from an adult.