Paper Example on Chaining to Teach a Functional Self-Help Skill to a Child With Autism

Introduction

One of the most worrying circumstances in parenthood is an occurrence of a developmental disorder in a child. There is a wide spectrum of these disorders but the most common include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia and autism spectrum disorder, simply known as autism (Richard & Noell, 2018). However, over the last decade or so, there is an increasingly high amount of knowledge on childhood developmental disorders. With early intervention by health and education professionals, children with such disorders have every chance to lead lives similar to the other kids as well. Autism is generally characterized by troubles with communication and socialization, as well as restricted and repetitive behavior. Signs of autism are gradual, and parent s begins to notice these signs as from three years or thereabouts. Some of the cause of this developmental disorder is genetic and developmental factors. There are a number of ways through which autism can be mitigated, focusing on self-help skills on daily basis, caused by deficits in adaptive behavior (Richard & Noell, 2018). This study delves into synthesizing the given article on the use of point-of-view video modeling and forward chaining to teach a functional self-help skill to a child with autism. This procedure is usually an exercise of watching the whole video and then trying to follow those procedures without referring to the video in the process.

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According to the article, effective programs of intervention that address basic self-help skills have the potential to improve the quality of life for the parents, caregivers and the children with autism. There is sufficient evidence, according to the article, that video modeling ideal for dealing with autism. Video modeling is a procedure that involves watching a demonstration of deficient traits, and then attempting the same. The article stipulates that video modeling is an established intervention procedure for children who suffer from autism as it produces the best effect in many behavioral disorders. The article, however, brings in the concept of forward chaining and stipulates that it is seamlessly used with video modeling to intervene in autism. Chaining is a procedural instruction used in behavioral psychology to improve an individual's response in a sequence to form a complex behavior. However, the article determines that researchers rarely use chaining in conjunction with video modeling to mitigate autism, before the study was carried out.

The article investigates the effects of forward chaining and video modeling to a participant of 4 years and 10 months to mitigate autism. The target behavior in the article is preparing and eating an afternoon snack, with all the data collected in the kitchen in the afternoon after the participant comes from playing school. The procedure had three phases; steps 1-4, steps 1-10 and then 1-13 in the given chaining provided in the article. It is paramount to note that interventions were done after the participant said he was hungry; in case he was not hungry, then chaining was not done. The result of the study, as the article posits, depicted that the use of video modeling and chaining leads to the rapid acquisition of skills (Richard & Noell, 2018). The participant improved drastically his skills in preparing an afternoon snack after the intervention that involved video modeling and forward chaining. According to the article, there are not unique ethical, legal or social validity considerations, but the parents must authorize the instructional strategy to be carried out to their children for it to be effective

References

Richard, P., & Noell, G. (2018). Teaching children with autism to tie their shoes using video prompt-models and backward chaining. Developmental Neurorehabilitation, 1-7. doi: 10.1080/17518423.2018.1518349