Errorless compliance training: success-focused behavioral treatment of children with Asperger syndrome

Errorless compliance training is a noncoercive, success-focused approach to treatment of problem behavior in children. The intervention involves graduated exposure of a child to increasingly more challenging requests at a slow enough rate to ensure that noncompliance rarely occurs, providing parents with many opportunities to reinforce cooperative responses and rendering punishment unnecessary. The authors evaluated this approach with three boys with characteristics of Asperger syndrome. Mothers first delivered a range of requests to their children and recorded child responses. For each child, the authors calculated compliance probability for all requests and categorized them into four probability levels, from those yielding high compliance (Level 1) to those that commonly led to opposition (Level 4). Treatment began with delivery of Level 1 requests. Requests from Levels 2 through 4 were faded in sequentially over several weeks. All three children demonstrated substantial generalized improvement in compliance.