Using peers to facilitate learning by students with moderate disabilities.

Abstract

Based on the research of the author with her colleagues, this article describes the effective use of peers in systematic procedures to facilitate learning by students with moderate disabilities. Five research investigations are described, and guidelines for using on peers are offered. Specifically, the article addresses the use of peers in the direct delivery of systematic procedures in both special and general education classrooms to facilitate acquisition and generalization. In addition, guidelines for using peers in the delivery of systematic procedures are offered. ********** Systematic instruction (Wolery, Ault, & Doyle, 1992) is an effective means of teaching skills to students with moderate disabilities. Systematic instructional trials consist of the delivery of an attentional cue, a discriminative stimulus (e.g., task direction), a delay interval, a prompt, a response interval, and a consequence. Response prompting strategies are a form of systematic instruction that employ prompts to increase the likelihood of correct responses. Examples include the time delay procedure in which the controlling prompt is faded over time as students begin to respond correctly before the prompt and the system of least prompts in which prompts are systematically faded by offering only the amount of assistance necessary from a set prompt hierarchy. To increase the efficiency of a response, the instructor may choose to add nontargeted information (i.e., additional information in the antecedent, the prompt, or the consequence) that may be acquired through repeated exposure over time. Also, the instructor may choose to use additional strategies that have been shown to facilitate generalization (e.g., multiple exemplars of material, instructors, or settings). One way that instructors can increase the number of instructional trials per day is to involve peers without disabilities. Peers are readily available to participate in instruction within the general education settings, and many special education classrooms for students with disabilities employ peer tutors within that setting. The purpose of this article is to describe a series of research investigations focusing on peer-mediated strategies that were conducted by the author and her colleagues over the course of several years. Specifically, the article will describe six research studies conducted in special and general education settings in which peers served as tutors in the direct delivery of instructors or as assistants to facilitate generalization and the acquisition of nontargeted information. In addition, the author discusses guidelines for using peers in systematic interactions with students with moderate disabilities REVIEW OF SELECTED RESEARCH STUDIES The following studies focused on the use of peers in the delivery of systematic procedures to facilitate learning. The studies all involved students with functional mental disabilities (FMD), which is the label Kentucky uses to secure services for students with moderate to severe disabilities, and their same-age peers without disabilities. In addition, each study employed a single subject research design to investigate a different aspect of peer involvement. An overview of the investigation is shown in Table 1, and a summary of each investigation is described in the following sections. Peers as Reliable and Effective Instructors Several of the investigations focused on the use of peers to deliver direct systematic instruction. In addition to addressing several research questions, each investigation examined whether peers can reliably implement systematic instructional procedures and whether that instruction is effective in teaching target behaviors. Peer- vs. teacher-delivered instruction in the special education classroom. Miracle, Collins, Schuster, and Grisham-Brown (2001) compared peer- to teacher-delivered instruction in teaching functional sight words to 4 students with FMD. …