Avaliando o uso de reforçamento em um procedimento de correção no ensino de tato para crianças com autismo

Abstract

An important aspect of intervention for people with autism based on Applied Behavior Analysis is that procedures should be used to reduce errors while learning a repertoire, considering the effects that errors may have on the learning process. Some studies have investigated the effects of correction procedure that requires active student response after the repetition of a trial with error. Some intervention manuals recommend do not reinforce answers corrected in the correction procedure with active response to prevent the establishment dependence of prompt used for correction. This study investigated the effect of reinforcement in an active-response correction procedure during the tact training in four children with autism. In an intra-participant design an echoic to tact training was made (initial training with simultaneous echoic prompt and then with a 3 s. delayed prompt) with adapted alternating treatment - one condition with reinforcement after corrections and the other condition unreinforced. All participants needed less correction trials in condition with reinforcement than in unreinforced correction condition, and participant‘s performance was superior in training condition with reinforcement after correction in nine of the twelve stimulus sets used in the study. We discuss the effectiveness of the reinforcement after the correction procedure, the absence of reinforcement dependence in this procedure, and the applied implications of the results.