Reference no: EM133426326

Assignment:

You have been providing PECS instruction to Jamisha, and it has been going pretty well. She knows how to hand over icons, but you are still teaching her to discriminate between different PECS icons. In the meantime, several problem behaviors have begun to emerge and you need to tackle these before they become too much of an issue. You think you could treat these with some Functional Communication Training and antecedent manipulations. You know it would take quite a long time to tackle these with PECS and want to immediately use a quite FCT intervention.

The first problem behavior is that when Jamisha is working with her RBTs and she becomes tired or is asked to do particularly hard work, she will begin to flop on the floor, roll around, and scream. The RBTs try to pick her up and put her in her chair, but she resists. Eventually, after much tantrumming she may eventually comply, or sometimes will begin to bite her hand at which point the RBTs have to physically intervene to prevent injury. Your suspicion, confirmed by observation, is that this behavior is escape maintained and you believe that one RBT in particular is becoming aversive as he is always the one to work on prepositions (a hard skill for Jamisha) and typically the one who has to physically intervene. When this RBT comes to work with Jamisha she often seems avoidant and sometimes cries or asks for the potty.

The second problem is that Jamisha will periodically elope from the classroom. She is young and agile and can quickly slip out the door if staff aren't watching. If she gets out of the classroom she will run down the hall or to other rooms where she will laugh and try to hide under furniture. When the RBT tries to retrieve her, she'll laugh and try to run away again. This appears to be quite enjoyable to her, and you think that perhaps she elopes in order to be chased by staff. When she's finally caught, staff place her in time out, but this doesn't seem to be effective as eloping has been increasing over the past three weeks.

Aside from these problem behaviors, Jamisha is generally doing quite well and is gaining skills quickly. However, she doesn't seem to engage well socially with peers. She wants to join in on the playground, but she becomes highly frustrated when things don't "go her way," when people don't play the game she wants to play, or when people don't play the game the ways it is supposed to play. For example, she was joining children going down the slide and became very upset when another classmate went down headfirst. On another instance, she was playing a game of chase when the other students suddenly stopped playing to go look at an interesting bug. She began to yell and cry and was generally inconsolable for the rest of recess. You think it would be good to work on the general behavior of tolerating change and not having her way. You'll need to develop some programming to build this skillset.

1. You need to implement functional communication training to decrease two specific problem behaviors.

• Develop an operational definition of the functional communicative response (FCR).
• Develop an operational definition of each problem behavior.

2. Develop a specific training procedure to teach the FCR.

• When does training occur? How do you prompt the FCR? How do you fade those prompts? What do you do if the problem behavior occurs?
• What procedures will you use to promote generalization?

3. Develop a data collection system. Describe a specific measurement procedure you will use to track client progress. Identify mastery criteria.

4. Develop a data sheet that works with your measurement procedure.