ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that social reinforcement in combination with prompting procedures, provided by a shadow teacher, were effective in increasing the social initiations as well as appropriate responding to peers' initiations of four children with autism during interactions with their classmates in preschool. It provides an experimental analysis of the effectiveness of treatment using a multiple baseline across subjects experimental design. The chapter investigates whether the intervention would be successful with young children, around the age of 4 years. It promotes response generalization of the target responses by using diverse and loose training in the sense of not teaching cliche initiation or reply statements, but rather using types of contextually appropriate responses when prompting from the shadow teacher was required. The chapter considers a method of direct observation, which may be viewed as a performance-based assessment, which is considered a more accurate type of assessment to evaluate treatment outcome.
