Instruction and practice – Are these enough for effective teaching?

Children with developmental disabilities, including autism, frequently require bespoke supports to learn new behaviours or develop important skills. A precise task analysis (i.e., a precise list of requisite behaviours for a targeted skill) is beneficial and in many cases necessary to guide supportive evidence-based procedures. The involvement of parents in these interventions is essential. We examined whether, after a brief training session, parents (n=7) were able to construct effective task-analyses. Videos were used to practice constructing a task-analysis for 16 specific skills. At baseline, parents used vague summary labels to describe the skills in the videos. After training, all participants were able to identify approbate numbers of steps for each of the 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 prior such experience (n=3). Findings suggest that a brief (one-day) group training event can be useful for teaching task analysis, albeit the effectiveness was limited.