Functional communication training and chained schedules of reinforcement to treat challenging behavior maintained by terminations of activity interruptions.

In this article, the authors evaluated functional communication training (FCT) and a chained schedule of reinforcement for the treatment of challenging behavior exhibited by two individuals diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and autism, respectively. Following a functional analysis with undifferentiated results, the authors demonstrated that challenging behavior was occasioned by interruptions of ongoing activities and maintained by terminations of interruptions. Next, they demonstrated the effectiveness of a treatment consisting of FCT with a chained schedule of reinforcement.

Assessment and treatment of elopement maintained by access to stereotypy.

We evaluated a treatment for elopement maintained by access to stereotypic door play. First, we conducted a functional analysis of elopement that produced undifferentiated results. Next, we conducted an assessment in which we evaluated the relation between elopement and door play.

Preschoolers' compliance with simple instructions: a descriptive and experimental evaluation.

Compliance is often used to describe a situation in which a child completes instructions from adults, and low levels of compliance are a common teacher concern. We conducted a descriptive assessment that showed that compliance was relatively stable for individual children, variable across children, and positively correlated with age. The impact of six antecedent variables (proximity, position, physical contact, eye contact, vocal attention, and play interruption) on compliance was assessed for 4 children.

An evaluation of intraverbal training to generate socially appropriate responses to novel questions.

Four preschool children (with and without disabilities), who often responded inappropriately to questions, participated in the current study. Pretest results were used to create sets of questions that the children either did or did not answer correctly (i.e.