Social skills training programs have increasingly enlisted same-age typical peers as instructors in the teaching of social skills to children with high-functioning ASD. The inclusion of peers in the teaching process has been found to be a critical component in these programs. There is strong support for incorporating peers in social skills programs yet still, there are few guidelines for training peers. The present study was done with the purpose to examine a treatment package that is used to teach typical school-aged children skills to become peer models.
The researchers used multiple baselines across behaviors research design. They were implemented using components of behavioral skills training to teach initiating verbal interactions, prompting for targeted skills, and delivery of praise. All these were used to evaluate and device the main considerations for the practice of the training peer models to promote social skills.
The study concluded through its findings that the peer models quickly acquired the skill of initiating verbal interactions. It is still important to pay attention to the posting of data, prompting, and additional contingencies were needed to maintain and generalize prompting for targeted skills and delivery of praise with novel children.
Reference: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1088357617735814
