A Systematic Replication: Instructive Feedback to Produce Emerging Play Responses

Abstract Social deficits are common in children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). To help facilitate the development of social behaviors, practitioners may target specific play skills, such as with toys. Previous researchers have used discrete trial training (DTT) to teach a variety of skills, including play, to individuals with ASD (Smith, 2001). DTT is a structured instructional procedure consisting of an antecedent instruction, learner response (with prompts provided as needed), consequence delivery, and a brief intertrial interval before the next trial. Building on this framework, instructive feedback (IF) has been used as an exposure-based procedure to promote play skills among individuals with ASD (Grow et al., 2016; Morton et al., 2023). IF embeds a secondary learning target commonly during the intertrial interval of the DTT sequence, typically following a correct response to the primary target, thereby providing additional learning opportunities without requiring separate teaching trials. In the current study, we replicated and extended Grow et al. (2016) and Morton et al. (2023) with three participants diagnosed with ASD. Participants received two forms of DTT that targeted speaker-responding, both with and without IF that involved modeling a play response with a toy. Overall, all participants acquired primary targeted speaker responses, and two participants demonstrated some acquisition and generalization of the secondary toy play responses. Our results extend previous research suggesting that including IF within DTT is effective in teaching speaker and play responding to children with ASD.