The use of visual cues to teach receptive skills to children with severe auditory discrimination deficits.

Abstract

Students who have not learned basic receptive communication skills using standard discrete trial methods are often recommended for programs. Lessons in these programs provide opportunities for students to learn new skills in contexts. Typically, these students are very successful at these types of routines. However, the teaching of skills in routines does not provide for the flexibility or conceptual complexity needed for higher-level skills. For example, when given a verbal instruction, the student's behavior is not controlled by auditory stimuli but rather the environmental and contextual cues. Without those cues the student does not follow the instruction. Given the powerful reinforcement history with visual stimuli observed in these students, new methods for teaching receptive communication are described. ********** For obvious reasons children need to learn to respond accurately to auditory stimuli. They need to discriminate among a variety of objects when asked to perform tasks in academic, non-academic and social environments. A teacher tells the child to color a picture red, retrieve a coat, match all animals with four legs, and so on. A classmate asks their peer to throw the ball or insists that the tree is home base. A parent requests that all the beans and carrots be eaten. The behavioral literature has numerous examples of the effectiveness of teaching skills to children with disabilities in contexts, e.g. Williams, Koegel and Egel, (1981) and/or capitalizing on the functionality of skills already in the child's repertoire (Clarke, Remington and Light, 1986). Skills traditionally taught in a more academic context have been demonstrated to be as, if not more, effectively taught in the context of activities (McGee, Krantz, and McClannahan, 1986), including receptive-labeling skills (McGee, Krantz, Mason, and McClannahan, 1983). In behaviorally based educational settings students who have demonstrated extreme difficulty learning basic receptive communication skills using standard discrete trial methods have been most often placed into what has been called a classroom. The lessons being implemented in the classroom provide opportunities for students to learn new skills in a setting. For example, students work on sequencing tasks and basic sorting skills that require attending to visual cues in the environment. For the most part, these students tend to be very successful at these types of routines. However, there is a limit to the amount of activities one can teach in a school setting. Additionally, the teaching of skills in routines does not provide for the flexibility or concept generalization needed for more complex skills. These students are often limited to following instructions where the setting provides environmental or contextual cues. For example, when asking a student to throw something away it is not the instruction that is the controlling stimulus but the crumpled pieces of paper handed to him. A less obvious example is the instruction, sit down. This kind of instruction following can be very deceiving in that it seems that the student is auditorily discriminating. In actuality, the student is responding to the environmental (lesson time) and contextual (near chair) cues. However, when the same instruction is given absent the environmental and contextual cues the student is unable to follow the instruction. This raises the issue of the effects of either masking, i.e. under a compound stimulus condition, the desired behavior is exhibited but is, in fact, controlled by only one of the stimuli present; or the possibility of overshadowing, i.e. the discriminative function of the visual stimulus actually prevents or interferes with the establishment of discriminative control by the auditory stimulus. Recognizing these limitations in our own functional classroom, it became necessary to explore different teaching methods, capitalizing on these students' excellent reinforcement history with visual stimuli. …