Instruction and practice – Are these enough for effective teaching?

Task analyses and chaining procedures are effective methods that behaviour analysts use for teaching skills to individuals on the autism spectrum. Breaking a skill into its individual components can help alleviate performance anxiety, teach skill acquisition and ensure long-term maintenance. We examined whether, after a training session, parents (n=7) were able to construct effective task-analyses. Videos were used to practice constructing a task-analysis for 16 skills. At baseline, parents used summary labels to describe the skills in the videos. After training, all were able to identify approbate numbers of steps for each skill in the videos. Participants, who had some previous experience with behaviour analysis (n=4) were able to identify more steps than participants with no experience (n=3). Findings suggest that a brief training event can be useful for teaching task analysis, albeit the effectiveness was narrow.