Children with autism often display oppositionality and severe disruptive behaviour in relation to academic tasks and other parental requests. Social deficits also represent a core symptom of this disorder. As a means of treating the challenging behaviours of these children, Ducharme and Drain (2004) evaluated a proactive, non-aversive intervention, errorless academic compliance training that was focused on building child tolerance to challenging demands. In this study, the four children demonstrated impressive improvements in child compliance to academic requests throughout and following treatment. Substantial generalization to untrained academic and non-academic requests also occurred. The current study replicated the intervention used in Ducharme and Drain (2004) with a larger sample of children with autism (eight) to further substantiate the efficacy of the approach and to examine potential covariant change in child social behaviours as a result of the intervention. In a multiple baseline across subjects design, parents implemented errorless academic compliance training with their children. During baseline, they delivered various academic and household requests to determine the probability of compliance for each request. We then developed a hierarchy of academic requests ranging from high probability (i.e., Level 1) to low probability (i.e., Level 4). At the beginning of treatment, parents delivered academic requests from Level 1 and provided praise and reinforcement for compliant child responses. Children were gradually introduced to increasingly more challenging requests from subsequent probability levels and rewarded for compliance to these requests. During both baseline and treatment, we also measured aspects of child social behaviour during sessions in which parents engaged in activities with their children. Participant children demonstrated high levels of compliance throughout and following treatment, as well as generalized cooperation to untrained academic and general household requests that were not the focus of treatment. Parents reported covariant behavioural improvements (i.e., reduced problematic behaviour and positive social gains), particularly for children exhibiting more core deficits of autism. Treatment gains were maintained up to 6 months following treatment. Errorless academic compliance training appears to hold considerable potential for improving the learning and social opportunities of children with autism.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/27576 |
| Date | 09 June 2011 |
| Creators | Drain, Tammy |
| Contributors | Ducharme, Joseph |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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