Many children with ASD partake in escape maintain behaviors for numerous reasons. Children with autism might have difficulty attending to long tasks, can get overwhelmed with novel activities, and the challenging behaviors may heighten when too many demands are placed on them. As a result, teachers, parents and interventionists may start to witness children’s challenging behaviors increase. Many of the challenging behaviors are thought to have an escape function from the long or difficult task at hand. This paper will find and address various strategies that may be applied to decrease escape maintained behaviors in children with ASD. The aim for this review study is to describe and evaluate research findings of antecedent-based strategies and evidence-based practices used to assist in decreasing escape maintained behaviors in children with ASD. This study is to suggest educational implications for interventionists and parents. Keywords: autism, escape, escape maintained behaviors, decrease challenging behaviors, alternative behaviors, antecedent based intervention, evidence based practices

Presession pairing is an antecedent intervention that has shown to decrease problem behavior of elementary school children with autism, whose problem behavior is maintained by social reinforcement. It has also shown modest increases in academic responding. However, the research on presession pairing has not examined its efficacy or acceptability in the natural classroom setting when implemented by the teacher. Therefore, this study used teacher training and a multiple baseline across participants design to test the potential efficacy of teacher-implemented presession pairing in increasing on-task behavior and reducing problem behavior of four students with problem behavior in inclusive public elementary school classrooms. The results indicated that the presession pairing successfully increased on-task behavior and decreased problem behavior for all participating students. The social validity assessment indicated that the teachers found the presession intervention contextually fit, easy to implement, and effective for all students in the classroom.

A large majority of adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have one or more special interests, i.e. interests that they find to be extremely motivating and engaging. Also, students with ASD often struggle to focus in classroom settings, as academic assignments are typically not as motivating as their special interests. Previous research has shown that special interests can be used to increase academic on-task behavior for young children with ASD but is lacking in terms of academic on-task behavior in adolescents. In this study, a multiple-baseline across participants was used to determine whether altering academic assignments to match individuals’ special interests would increase on-task behaviors in three high school students with ASD. The intervention proved to be effective, as on-task behavior increased in all three participants. Although altering assignments did require some time from teachers this is likely justifiable, given the positive effects for the students. / En övervägande majoritet av ungdomar med autismspektrumtillstånd (AST) har ett eller flera specialintressen; intressen som de tycker är extremt motiverande och engagerande. Dessutom uppvisar elever med AST ofta svårigheter med att fokusera i klassrumsmiljöer, eftersom akademiska uppgifter vanligtvis upplevs vara mindre motiverande än deras specialintressen. Tidigare forskning har visat att specialintressen kan användas för att öka akademiskt on-task-beteende hos små barn med AST, med det saknas forskning gällande detta område hos ungdomar. I den här studien användes en multipel baslinje-design för att undersöka hur inkluderandet av specialintressen i skoluppgifter påverkade akademiskt on-task beteende hos tre gymnasieelever med AST. Interventionen visade sig vara effektiv, då on-task-beteendet ökade hos alla tre deltagare. Trots att denna typ av anpassning av uppgifter är tidskrävande för lärare, är tidsåtgången sannolikt befogad utifrån de positiva effekter det hade för eleverna.