Teaching children how and when to make emergency telephone calls

Abstract

The present study examined a behavioral procedure which was designed to teach young children how and when to make emergency phone calls. Experiment 1 compared the effectiveness of three conditions — behavioral training, teacherdevised training and no training — in teaching children how to make emergency calls. The conditions were administered to six classes in two different preschool programs. The behavioral training program resulted in significantly greater improvements in emergency dialing skills relative to teacher-devised and no-training conditions. Experiment 2 examined a discrimination training procedure with selected subjects from Experiment 1 to ensure that the children not only knew how to make the emergency phone calls but also knew when to make them, i.e., in what situations. In a multiple baseline design across children, the discrimination training procedure was shown to improve performance in identifying when to apply the emergency dialing skills.