According to Stokes and Baer (1977), an intervention should produce a change in behavior across a variety of situations and related behavior for a skill to have maximum utility. One effective way to plan for this generalization is to create multiple opportunities under a variety of related conditions for a student to learn a skill. In the areas of play and social skills, the development of such a generalized repertoire can prove to be quite challenging. This presentation will review several studies that used a variety of relevant training stimuli to adequately reflect the diversity of social stimuli characteristics likely to be present under generalization conditions. Specifically, social stimuli were grouped into experimenter-defined stimulus classes or categories for the purposes of teaching. Additional teaching procedures, such as video modeling, prompt/prompt fading, and script/script fading, were used to teach these skills. All studies resulted in generalized repertoires of a variety of social and play skills, including helping, sharing, engaging in joint attention, sociodramatic play, and social commenting. Integration of these findings will be discussed as well as future areas of research.
Review Sharon A. Reeve’s biographical statement.