Training two severely retarded adolescents to ask questions

Area of Science:

• Behavioral Psychology
• Developmental Disabilities Research
• Special Education

Background:

• Individuals with intellectual disabilities often face challenges in developing spontaneous questioning behaviors.
• Teaching effective communication and inquiry skills is crucial for enhancing learning and independence in this population.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the effectiveness of different teaching strategies in fostering question-asking skills in children with intellectual disabilities.
• To compare the impact of observational learning versus prompted reinforcement on the acquisition of probe item questioning.

Main Methods:

• An across-subject, multiple baseline design was employed.
• Two participants with intellectual disabilities were trained to discriminate between known (training) and unknown (probe) items.
• Interventions included modeling and prompted reinforcement for asking questions.

Main Results:

• Observational modeling alone did not lead to appropriate questioning of probe items.
• Prompted reinforcement for asking questions about training items resulted in the participants beginning to ask questions about probe items.
• The intervention demonstrated effectiveness in establishing the desired behavior.

Conclusions:

• Prompted reinforcement is a more effective strategy than simple modeling for teaching question-asking skills to children with intellectual disabilities.
• Targeted reinforcement procedures can facilitate the generalization of learned behaviors to novel situations (probe items).
• This research provides valuable insights into applied behavior analysis for improving communication in special education settings.