Strategies and tactics for promoting generalization and maintenance of young children's social behavior.

Employing a conceptual framework of generalization strategies proposed by Stokes and Osnes (1986), the authors selectively reviewed the research literature concerning interventions to improve young children's social behavior and strategies for promoting generalization and maintenance of young children's social responding. Three basic strategies are discussed: (a) taking advantage of natural communities of reinforcement, (b) training diversely, and (c) incorporating functional mediators, along with several accompanying tactics, to improve children's social interactions. Pragmatic recommendations for proactive programming of generalization and maintenance of young children's social behavior are included. In addition, the authors argue for the continued development of a technology (or technologies) of generalization and maintenance for young children's social competence interventions.

Fading teacher prompts from peer-initiation interventions for young children with disabilities.

This study examined a system for fading teacher prompts to children who served as peers in peer-initiation interventions for young children with disabilities. A teacher taught peers to direct social initiations to children with disabilities, provided verbal prompts for those initiations, and introduced a system that provided peers with visual feedback about the social interactions of the children with disabilities. She then systematically withdrew the verbal prompts to peers, and subsequently faded the visual feedback system. Peer initiations increased when the intervention began and resulted in increases in social interaction for the children with disabilities. As the teacher systematically faded the prompts and visual feedback to the peers, social interaction continued at the levels found during intervention and was maintained during a short maintenance period.

Effects of social integration on preschool children with handicaps.

This study examined the effects of (a) integrating handicapped and nonhandicapped children in preschools and (b) a condition designed to promote social integration. Fifty-six children with mild and moderate handicaps were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions: integrated/social interaction, integrated/child-directed, segregated/social interaction, and segregated/child-directed. Observation revealed a higher proportion of interactive play, as well as higher language development, in the social interaction conditions; and children in the integrated/social interaction condition received significantly higher ratings of social competence. These data suggest that structuring social interaction between higher and lower performing children can result in benefits to the lower performing students.

A comparison of peer-initiation and teacher-antecedent interventions for promoting reciprocal social interaction of autistic preschoolers.

We compared two procedures for improving the social interactions of three autistic children. In a peer-initiation condition, confederates were taught to initiate interaction with the autistic children. In a teacher-antecedent condition, teachers prompted the autistic children to initiate with confederates, who had been taught to reciprocate. Using an alternating treatment design, differential effects were found. The peer-initiation procedure reliably increased the social responses of the autistic children, whereas the teacher-antecedent condition increased the initiations and responses of the autistic children. In addition, longer chains of social interaction occurred during the teacher-antecedent condition.

Increasing handicapped preschoolers' peer social interactions: cross-setting and component analysis.

The purposes of our study were: (a) to train a set of observationally determined social behaviors via peer initiation; (b) to determine if effects generalized across classroom settings and to directly intervene if generalization did not occur; and (c) to analyze components of the peer-initiation intervention. After baseline, nonhandicapped preschool children (confederates) were taught to direct social initiations to the three handicapped preschool-aged students. Teachers prompted the confederates to engage the students in social interaction when necessary and rewarded the confederates with tokens. Confederates' initiations to the students resulted in increased frequencies of positive social interaction. There was no generalization to other classroom settings, and the intervention was subsequently implemented in a second and third classroom. Next, the confederates' token reinforcement system was withdrawn, with no apparent deleterious effects on the confederates' or students' social interactions. When teachers substantially reduced their prompts to the confederates, students' social interactions decreased. Finally, reinstatement of teacher prompts resulted in increases in the confederates' social initiations and, consequently, the positive social interactions of the students.