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The concept of "creativity" has been studied under the perspective of variability in behavior analysis. Creativity and variable responding contributes to problem solving in novel situations, learning new responses in different environments, and promote interactions that would otherwise be prohibited by repetitive behaviors and routines. During childhood, play contributes to the emergence of creativity and variability. Children develop many skills that are important to their lives while engaging in play behaviors. Some of those skills include self-advocacy, communication, and problem solving. Researchers have investigated different methods to promote variable play skills in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). There is limited research on prompting as an isolated variable in increasing variability in play responses. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of prompting on variable play skills. Results indicated that verbal instructions and modeling were effective in increasing variable play responses. Both participants displayed a sustained increase in novel item engagement when exposed to prompting.

This study explored the design and development of the knowledge harvesting and knowledge management components of a comprehensive tool which incorporates characteristics of continuity management, knowledge harvesting, and knowledge management. While tools exist to support restoring continuity in the aftermath of a disastrous event, little is done to address maintaining continuity through the non-disastrous events. Employee separation is one such non-disastrous event, and one that all organizations face. Knowledge harvesting is suggested as a means to address collecting the knowledge of employees within an organization so that it can be reused by new employees or temporary replacements. The combination of the attributes of continuity management, knowledge harvesting, and knowledge management resulted in five characteristics of a comprehensive tool. These characteristics were operationalized in the design of a comprehensive tool and provided contextual information for the design and development of the knowledge harvesting and knowledge management components. Findings of the evaluations of the components indicated that the developed components complied with the design-based specifications. Lessons learned from the implementation and evaluations of the knowledge harvesting component suggest that the right questions for the knowledge harvesting process should be determined by the organization based on the need for the information and the nature of the information needed; that the tool should incorporate terminology, prompting questions, and a structure that are right for the organization and that the users will understand; that users may benefit from time to respond and having options to submit responses in various formats; and that users may benefit from encouragement and support throughout the knowledge harvesting process. Lessons learned from the implementation and evaluations of the knowledge management components suggest that the ability to provide a prompt follow-up to a user's response could improve the effectiveness of the tool; that the structure and development of the database requires precision; and that while the database must be precise, it must also be flexible and accurately accommodate changes to the content. / Ph. D.

Large Language Models (LLM) and their abilities of text-to-SQL are today a very relevant topic, as utilizing an LLM as a database interface would facilitate easy access to the data in the database without any prior knowledge of SQL. What is being studied in this thesis, is how to best structure a prompt to increase the accuracy of an LLM on a text-to-SQL task. The methods of experimentation used in the study were experimentation with 5 different prompts, and a total of 22 questions asked about the database with the questions being of difficulties varying from easy to extra hard. The results showed that a simpler, less descriptive prompt performed better on the easy and medium questions, while a more descriptive prompt performed better on the hard and extra hard questions. The f indings did not fully align with the hypothesis that more descriptive prompts would have the most correct outputs. In conclusion, it seemed that prompts that contained less ”clutter” and were more straightforward were more effective on easy questions, while on harder questions a prompt with a better description and examples had a better impact.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience difficulties with learning age-appropriate daily living skills (DLS) at their homes, schools, and in the community. Such skills are significant for independent life, post-school education, employment, and overall quality of life. Video prompting (VP) is a teaching practice that has demonstrated positive outcomes in teaching a variety of DLS to individuals with ASD. The overarching purpose of this collected papers dissertation was to investigate the effects of VP interventions on improving DLS of individuals with ASD. This dissertation included two separate papers. The first paper was a meta-analysis that examined the overall effect of VP when teaching DLS to individuals with ASD across single-case research design (SCRD) studies. An analysis of potential moderators was also examined: VP intervention types, participants’ ages, and participants’ disabilities. There were 54 participantsacross17 studies meeting the study’s inclusion criteria. The results demonstrated a high-moderate effect size (ES) for VP on the acquisition of DLS across 17 studies including 54 participants. The analysis of potential moderators showed no significant differences across all moderator variables. Limitations and implications for research and practices are provided in Chapter II. The second paper was a SCRD study comparing the effects of VP alone to least-to-most prompting alone on improving three office-related tasks to secondary-aged children with developmental disabilities. An adapted alternating treatment design (AATD), including baseline, comparison, best treatment, and final treatment phases was used to examine the interventions. Data related to the effects, efficiency, and social validity of both interventions were collected to address the research questions. Video prompting was effective for all participants, while least-to-most promoting was effective for two participants. Also, VP was more efficient than least-to-most prompting in terms of sessions-to-criterion and percent of errors for all participants. Least-to-most prompting was more efficient than VP in terms of the total duration of teaching time for all participants. Finally, all participants and their teachers reported positive perspectives regarding the study’s procedures and outcomes. Limitations, future research, and implications for practices are discussed in Chapter III. Lastly, the summary of the entire dissertation and extended discussions of both papers are presented in Chapter IV.

Behavior-specific praise has been shown to increase rate of desired behaviors for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, though it is rarely used by caregivers in residential facilities for adults with disabilities. Prompting in the form of tactile stimulation has been demonstrated to increase rate of behavior-specific praise delivered by teachers and caregivers. The purpose of the current study was to increase the quantity and quality of behavior-specific praise statements that were delivered by caregivers to individuals at a large residential facility for adults with disabilities. A tactile prompting device (Gymboss Interval Timer and Stopwatch) was provided to the caregivers and set to vibrate for one second at intervals of five minutes, for a total of six intervals. Instructions were provided to the caregivers to deliver behavior-specific praise statements, for appropriate behaviors, to their assigned clients every time a vibration occurred. Examples of behavior-specific praise statements were provided to the caregivers before each session, but no feedback was delivered during the prompting phase. Results indicated that a tactile prompting device was effective at increasing rate of behavior-specific praise statements delivered by caregivers in as little as one session.

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Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T13:17:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Fernanda Cristina Marques.pdf: 1583337 bytes, checksum: 89fc35b70bc25acc6534461616827a7e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-06-05 / This study evaluated three procedures to teach single digit addition to three children diagnosed with Autism. It was intended to specifically compare a parallel design of independent variables for the three procedures including Constant Time Delay, Simultaneous Prompting and No-No Prompting. With the simultaneous model, a matching procedure was used to train the children to point to the sum (model) when given a field of three numbers to compare, one being the correct answer. Prior to teaching, a complete probe of all additions of all blocks was implemented to determine baseline levels. Then the children were taught three additions in each block for each procedure, ensuring that the number of training trials for all teaching sessions remained constant for each procedure in each session. Daily probes were also conducted, as they were considered the most effective to achieve 100% accuracy in three consecutive daily sessions. Results indicate that the Constant Time Delay procedure was the most effective for teaching two participants whereas Simultaneous Prompting was most effective for the other participant. Theses results also demonstrate the need for more comparative studies to further evaluate the optimal teaching procedure / Este estudo ensinou somas por meio dos procedimentos Atraso de Tempo Constante, Simultaneous Prompting e No-No Prompting para três crianças com diagnóstico de autismo. Utilizou-se o emparelhamento com o modelo simultâneo no qual as crianças foram treinadas a apontar o resultado de uma soma (modelo) quando apresentados três números comparação, sendo um deles a resposta correta. O presente estudo pretendeu comparar por meio de um delineamento de tratamento paralelo de variáveis independentes os três procedimentos. Foram ensinadas três somas em cada bloco para cada procedimento. O número de tentativas nas sessões de ensino permanecia o mesmo em cada sessão para cada procedimento. Antes do início do ensino era aplicada uma sonda completa composta por todas as somas de todos os blocos. Também foram realizadas sondas diárias. Considerava-se mais eficaz o procedimento de ensino que atingisse 100% de acertos em três sessões diárias consecutivas. Os resultados mostraram que o procedimento Atraso de Tempo Constante foi o mais efetivo para o ensino desta tarefa para dois participantes e o Simultaneous Prompting para um participante. Os resultados indicam a necessidade de mais estudos comparativos de procedimentos de ensino