Education and Treatment of Children

Abstract:

Providing group instruction with high levels of opportunities to respond, including unison responding, is critical to maximize the educational instruction of individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in public schools. Direct Instruction (DI) has shown promise in teaching skills to students with ASD. DI is generally taught to small groups of students and relies heavily on unison responding; however, research on DI has not provided the detail needed to support unison responding implementation with students with ASD who exhibit interfering behaviors. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of systematic task breaks and proximity fading on unison responding during small-group DI with four students with ASD. Results indicated a functional relation between the intervention and student responding. One student, an English-language learner, required a Spanish directive to increase her responding to an acceptable level. A discussion of limitations, future research, and practical implications is included.