This study investigated the effects of self-monitoring instruction delivered by peer tutors on the occurrence of academic survival skills displayed by five middle school students with severe disabilities. We employed a multiple baseline across subjects design. Instruction was provided in general education content classes. The students were taught to indicate on a self-recording sheet if they performed each of 11 skills. Data revealed an increase in the percentages of occurrence of survival skills across all students. Also, their general education teachers indicated that they observed a positive change for four of the five students. All students indicated that they believed that they were part of the class and reported an increase in their classroom participation. The implications of these findings are discussed.
Inclusive programs involving toddlers with and without disabilities are becoming increasingly common. However, little research has evaluated the effects of specific aspects of inclusive services on participating children without disabilities. Due in part to parental concerns over a potentially reductive impact of manual signing on the communicative verbalizations of children without disabilities, we evaluated effects of manual signing by a classroom teacher on verbalizations of toddlers in an inclusive classroom. Manual signing was introduced sequentially by the teacher within ongoing verbal interactions with the toddlers in three play activities. Results indicated that teacher signing was accompanied by increases in communicative interactions involving signing with the teacher by each group of toddlers with and without disabilities. No reductive effects on communicative verbalizations were observed for any toddler group. These results offer support for using signing in an inclusive classroom without detrimental effects on the verbal functioning of children without disabilities. Future research should focus on conducting similar evaluations in other types of inclusive settings.
We examined the differences between two groups of general education high school students: those who volunteered to participate in a peer buddy program designed to increase their social interactions with their peers with severe disabilities (n = 30), and those who chose not to volunteer (n = 30). Differences were examined using the Social Distance Questionnaire for Attitudes of High School Students Toward Handicapped Persons. Analyses indicated that, at pre-test, peer buddies reported significantly greater willingness to interact with people with severe disabilities and more previous contact with these individuals than did nonvolunteers. There were no differences between the scores of the groups on knowledge of disability or affect toward persons with disabilities. After one semester of enrollment in the program, social willingness, knowledge, and contact scores of peer buddies increased significantly, whereas the scores of nonvolunteers remained the same as at the pre-test. In addition, students' self-reported previous contact with individuals with disabilities positively correlated with their scores indicating their social willingness to interact with their peers with disabilities. Implications of the study are discussed with respect to benefits of and recommendations for peer interaction programs.
This review examines research studies that utilize the behavior chain interruption strategy (BCIS) to teach communication skills to individuals with severe disabilities. The BCIS is a naturalistic teaching procedure that uses an interruption to a behavior chain (i.e., a routine) as the point of instruction. The BCIS has been successfully applied to the teaching of communication skills to individuals across a wide range of ages and of levels of disability, including learners with multiple disabilities. It has been employed to teach a range of communication forms, including pictorial communication systems, natural gestures, signing, and a switch activated communication device. However, a number of questions remain regarding the BCIS. In particular, it is questioned whether the type of interruptions employed in the procedure are likely to occur outside a training context and whether communication taught with the procedure generalizes to out-of-routine contexts. Implications for practice are considered and suggestions are offered for future research.
