Teaching Students to Request the Continuation of Routine Activities by Using Time Delay and Decreasing Physical Assistance in the Context of Chain Interruption

Abstract

Three students with profound intellectual, sensory, and physical disabilities learned to activate a communication device as a “want”/request function within an initial chain interruption context and generalized the use of the switch for the same function to the two or three remaining contexts when these chains were interrupted. The intervention consisted of the use of a consistent response interval to allow for student preference and increasing time delay paired with decreasing physical assistance to teach initiation of an adaptive switch to operate a call device. A multiple baseline design across participants with successive generalization contexts was employed. The intervention was successful with all three students. Each participant learned to initiate and activate a device to request the continuation of routines in which they were only partially physically active or in which their participation was purely social. The outcomes are important for the participant population since previous work typically has focused on requests for reinforcers such as objects, food, or social attention. In the following study the participants requested the continuation of an activity. The role of initiation versus performance data is discussed, as well as issues related to the validity of learning outcomes and measurement of those outcomes for the target population.