Graduation Year

2008

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

M.A.

Degree Granting Department

Applied Behavior Analysis

Major Professor

Raymond Miltenberger, Ph.D.

Co-Major Professor

Timothy Weil, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Shelley Clarke, M.A.

Keywords

Mental retardation, Group home setting, Multiple opportunity method, Video chunking, Least-to-most prompting

Abstract

Because many individuals with developmental disabilities prefer to be as independent as possible, strategies need to be developed to teach them functional skills. Video prompting is a fairly new technology, in which a person learns to engage in a complex behavior by viewing steps of a task analysis on video. The steps are broken down so that the task is more manageable for the individual. The present study evaluated how many steps needed to be presented in the video model for the learner to acquire a functional skill. Three individuals between the ages of 17 and 29 and diagnosed with mental retardation were selected as participants. The target behaviors were to complete a 10 component laundry skill in a group home setting. Starting with viewing the entire task on video, the task was broken down into halves, then thirds, and so on until the individual performed all steps to criterion. A multiple baseline design was used to show the results of the video prompting procedure. The results showed that one individual learned the task with 5 steps in each video segment, another learned the task with the video broken into 4, 3, and 3 segments, and the final participant did not learn from video. For this participant, a least to most prompting procedure was effective.

Share

COinS