Color-matching technique to train children in the correct use of stairs.

Color cues were used to train four severely retarded children and two learning disabled children to move in a left foot-right foot alteration pattern when using stairs. The occurrence of left-right alterations and marking time behavior was recorded throughout baseline and training conditions. The color-cue procedure effectively produced a consistent pattern of alteration of four of the children and eliminated marking time in three of the children. Physical prompts were used to train alteration in two children for whom color-cue training was not sufficient. At the termination of training, observations of the children's performances in new settings and to new adults were conducted. Results indicated that the children continued to alternate correctly. In addition, follow-up investigations conducted between two weeks to 16 months after training indicated that the children were maintaining the stair alteration pattern. Future research should determine whether a visual-cue procedure could be used in training other forms of locomotion or motor behavior.

Peer facilitation of generalization in a preschool classroom.

Two 5-year-old deviant preschoolers taught each other, as peer-tutors, to identify pictorial figures describing prepositional relationships. During training sessions monitored by the experimenter, the child in the peer-tutor role presented stimulus materials and provided consequences for the responses of the child in the tutee role. An assessment of generalization by each child to an academic classroom setting occurred each day. The data showed that the peer-tutor could facilitate generalization, when the tutee was probed in the peer-tutor's presence. However, it was found that the salience of the peer-tutor's presence was critical to this effect. In particular, when the peer presented the stimuli or offered occasional consequences for some correct responses, generalization was greatly enhanced.

Interactions between teacher guidance and contingent access to play in developing preacademic skills of deviant preschool children.

Token-mediated access to play and snacks was made contingent on completion of academic tasks in the Baseline Experiment. This contingency produced stable completion rates that were subsequently doubled, and then tripled, for four deviant children in a special preschool. A reversal design demonstrated that the contingency was functional in maintaining the children's rates of task completion. The Guidance Experiment examined the role of a social event, teacher guidance, in the acquisition of task-completion skills, in a multiple-baseline-across-tasks design (with reversals). The analysis demonstrated that teacher guidance was an important supplement to the token-mediated contingency in establishing significant increases in task completions for a second group of three deviant children in the special class. The importance of teacher guidance was related to the difficulty level of the children's tasks.