Abstract
Caregivers of children with an autism spectrum disorder are often responsible for assisting their children to complete activities of daily living skills. Effective and efficient caregiver training methods are needed to train caregivers. The present study used two concurrent multiple-baseline across-participants designs to evaluate the effects of real-time feedback and behavioral skills training on training eight caregivers to implement teaching procedures for activities of daily living skills with their child. We assessed caregivers’ accuracy and correct implementation of the six-component teaching procedure after they received either real-time feedback or behavioral skills training. Caregivers from both groups mastered and maintained correct implementation of the teaching procedures with their child. The overall results suggest that real-time feedback and behavioral skills training are efficacious to train caregivers to implement activities of daily living skills procedures with their children, and that real-time feedback may be an efficient alternative method to train caregivers.
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Funding
This study was partially funded by fellowship funds from the Buffett Early Childhood Institute Graduate Scholars Program at the University of Nebraska.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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This research was completed in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the doctoral degree of philosophy for Elizabeth J. Preas at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Research Highlights
• Real-time feedback may be an efficient alternative approach to train caregivers procedures to teach activities of daily living skills (ADLS).
• Providing behavior-specific feedback in the moment on each component of a teaching procedure can improve a caregiver’s performance of implementing ADLS immediately.
• As with previous research on behavioral skills training, this training is an effective approach to train caregivers ADLS teaching procedures and may allow caregivers more practice opportunities prior to implementing the procedures with their child.
• Caregivers may require training across multiple ADLS to demonstrate generalization of the ADLS teaching procedures to novel ADLS.
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Preas, E.J., Mathews, T.L. Evaluation of Caregiver Training Procedures to Teach Activities of Daily Living Skills. Behav Analysis Practice 14, 958–973 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-020-00513-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-020-00513-z