Life skills instruction for children with developmental disabilities.

The Preschool Life Skills program is an intervention package designed to teach functional skills to prevent problem behavior in typically developing children. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effects of the instructional package (renamed "Life Skills") with children with developmental disabilities. The program involved teaching 12 life skills to nine participants across four instructional units. The units were instruction following, functional communication, tolerance of denial and delay, and friendship skills. Teachers provided instruction through a three-tiered instructional approach, starting with class-wide instruction followed by small group and one-to-one instruction as necessary. We extended previous research by using visual prompts during all three tiers and progressively increasing intertrial intervals during one-to-one instruction. Results indicated that the intervention led to skill acquisition with all nine participants. The skills maintained 4 weeks after instruction ended.

Rethinking Essential Services in the Wake of the COVID-19 Health Crisis.

During the COVID-19 global pandemic, Cook Children's Health Care System needed a way to ensure that all employees had a reliable childcare option. This advocacy note details how Child Study Center, an applied behavior analysis facility in North Texas, transitioned into Camp Cook, a free-of-charge childcare facility that operates weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Closing the doors on our billable services allowed us to open them to the essential health care workers who were fighting on the front lines against COVID-19. Here we describe the redeployment of employees across 3 departments in an effort to ease the burden of childcare within our local community.

Use of sounding out to improve spelling in young children.

We examined the effects of teaching 5 typically developing elementary students to sound out their spelling words while writing them using the cover-copy-compare (CCC) method to practice spelling. Each student's posttest performance following practice with sounding out was compared to that student's posttest performance following practice with no sounding out. For every student, posttest accuracy was higher following practice with sounding out, indicating that it is an effective and easily implemented strategy to improve spelling instruction.