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| Training the Mand: Intervention Strategies and Tactics for Use with Students with Autism. |
| Friday, May 23, 2008 |
| 10:00 AM–5:00 PM |
| 4A |
| Area: AUT; Domain: Applied Research |
| CE Instructor: Amiris Dipuglia, M.D. |
| AMIRIS DIPUGLIA (ABACARD, LLC), MICHAEL MIKLOS (Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network) |
| Description: The Pennsylvania Verbal Behavior Project has provided intensive behavioral interventions for children with autism for the past six years through behavioral consultative support to public school special education classrooms. Over that period, a central focus of consultative support to teachers has been on mand training. Mand training is an often overlooked but critical component of effective language programming for children with autism. Teaching the mand, while often fun for both trainers and students, is also a challenging and technical process. The mand repertoire necessary for effective social functioning includes skills beyond asking to obtain preferred items and events. Conversational interactions involve frequent mands for information and mands for specific social behaviors of the listener. Effective instruction of mand skills requires careful sequencing of instruction. This session will include a review of the literature on mand training for children with autism. Conceptual foundations including differentiation of subtypes of motivative operations and issues related to the multiple control of verbal behavior will be discussed in relation to formulating mand training tactics and strategies. Assessment protocols for the mand repertoire will be reviewed included skill sequences from both the VB-MAPP (Sundberg, 2008) and the ABLLS-R (Partington, 2006.) Basic teaching procedures to be presented include establishing and maintaining motivation, response form selection, prompt and prompt fade procedures, and discrimination and broadening of responses repertoire. Specific protocols for teaching mands for items, for actions, mands for information, mands of assertion and negation will be presented. This workshop will include providing participants with training materials including a training manual. Methods for assessing student outcomes and treatment fidelity will be reviewed. Video examples will be shown. |
| Learning Objectives: 1.Participants will define what a mand is, how it is similar to terms such as asking, requesting, demanding, commanding and so on, and how it uniquely describes a relationship between the conditions in a child�s environment and the child�s tendency to initiate interactions with other people. 2.Participants will discuss evocative and function altering effects of various stimuli in relation to motivative variables in the mand frame. 3.Participants will differentiate variables related to response form selection in mand training. 4.Participants will identify student performance patterns suggestive of entry point in mand training skill sequence. 5.Participants will demonstrate instructional behaviors specific to various mand training protocols. |
| Activities: 1.Lecture and demonstration of various conceptual and teaching procedures will be provided. 2.Guided practice sessions for various mand protocols. 3.Protocol review of mand skill sequence assessments 4.Practice in formulating response form selection from assessment protocols. |
| Audience: 1.Behavior analysts providing consultation and program design of behavioral interventions for students with autism 2.Direct instructional staff serving students with autism 3.Others interested in application of the analysis of verbal behavior |
| Content Area: Practice |
| Instruction Level: Intermediate |