Classroom treatment of autistic children: II. Individualized instruction in a group.

Abstract

This study was designed to assess the feasibility of providing individualized instruction in a classroom of autistic children. In particular, we investigated whether students' unsupervised responding was a variable which would influence the effectiveness of individualized instruction procedures. Initially, one teacher attempted to teach different academic behavior to four autistic children simultaneously. During these sessions the teacher rotated from child to child, providing individualized instructions and reinforcers to each. We found, however, that each child stopped responding whenever the teacher rotated to a different child and, further, no academic progress occurred for any of the children during these sessions. In a multiple baseline design, treatment procedures were then introduced (prompt fading, chaining, and programmed instructional materials) to teach each student to continue working for an extended period of time after each instruction from the teacher. After treatment, sessions of individualized instruction in a group were reintroduced for each child. The results showed that unsupervised responding was an important variable influencing the effectiveness of individualized instruction. Specifically, the data show that (1) unsupervised responding, acquired during treatment, generalized to the group setting; (2) after treatment, each child began to make progress on his assigned tasks; and (3) programming instructional materials in small steps appeared to be necessary in order to ensure the maintenance of unsupervised responding across changes in instructional materials. By the end of this study it was possible for one teacher to simultaneously teach four autistic children — with each child learning at his own rate, on his own task, with minimal supervision from the teacher. It is suggested that the generalizability of these results, to other settings where continuous supervision is difficult, may be an important concern of future research.