Training University Psychology Students to Teach Multiple Skills to Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Training people interested in implementing Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) interventions to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is important to promote skill gains. A recommended training package is called behavioral skills training (BST), which involves four components (didactic instruction, modeling, role-play, and performance feedback).

The purpose was to assess the effects of BST on the accurate teaching of multiple skills via DTT by six psychology university students to a confederate and six children diagnosed with ASD. Generalization and maintenance assessments were conducted.

Through the research conditions, all university participants were able to teach ten different skills (sitting still, motor imitation, making requests, vocal imitation, receptive identification of non-verbal stimuli, making eye contact, following instructions, intraverbal, labeling, receptive identification of non-verbal stimuli by function, feature and class) with a high integrity level to the children. In addition, across four months after training, all participants maintained high teaching integrity levels while teaching skills to the children related to their individualized curriculum goals. Each child accumulated over 1000 correct responses across several sessions. The university participants rated their training with the highest possible score in a social validity assessment.

BST successfully trained psychology university students to accurately teach multiple skills via DTT to children with ASD and involved long lasting effects. Limitations and new avenues for research were discussed.