A primary goal of early intervention services is to identify teaching strategies that will help close the gap between the skill level of children with autism spectrum disorders and that of their typically developing peers. The efficiency of instruction, or the amount of time required to teach a new skill, may be enhanced by using certain instructional strategies that have been shown to produce rapid learning or future learning. Instructive feedback is one example of an instructional strategy that can decrease training time or increase the amount of skills that a child learns during instruction. Instructive feedback has been shown to be effective in teaching new skills to children and adults with developmental disabilities in more than 20 published studies. In this presentation, Dr. Kodak will review different formats of instructive feedback and present results from several of her studies that demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of instructive feedback for teaching verbal behavior to children with autism spectrum disorders. Dr. Kodak also will discuss how specific behaviors displayed by children during instruction may be associated with the effectiveness of this procedure. Finally, she will describe how instructive feedback may be incorporated into clinical practice to maximize learning outcomes.
CE: 1.0 credit BACB