“Safety skills” is an umbrella term consisting of a wide variety of skills. Research has shown that all children have the risk of being injured perhaps fatally because of the intentional and unintentional accidents. Children with autism spectrum disorder face two or three times the risk of injury or abuse compared with those of their same age peers. Ensuring children’s safety is, and should always be, a concern for parents, teachers, and society. However, it is well-documented that teaching safety skills to children with autism spectrum disorder is often neglected both clinically and experimentally. In a relatively new study, it is indicated that (a) although parents and teachers found safety skills instruction important and necessary, they use natural occurrences as teaching opportunities and prevention behaviors rather than providing systematic instruction and (b) neither parents nor teachers have enough knowledge and experience for teaching safety skills (Sirin & Tekin-Iftar, 2016). However, research has shown that when taught systematically, children with autism spectrum disorder could acquire safety skills and perform them over time and across persons and settings. During this workshop the strategies for assessing and teaching safety skills to children with autism spectrum disorder will be presented based on the author’s research over the past 20 years. Topics will include the important of assessment, implementing in situ assessments, taking data-based decision during safety skill instruction, three teaching strategies (i.e., behavioral skills training, simultaneous prompting procedure, and video modelling) for teaching safety skills, promoting generalization and maintenance of safety teaching, and ethical aspects of safety skills teaching. Identifying and defining safety threats appropriate to the child’s level and environment will be shared. I addition to that, I will discuss how to conduct in-situ assessment of safety skills in home, school, and other community setting. Attendees will learn how to design and conduct instruction with behavioral skills training, simultaneous prompting procedure, and video modeling. They will also learn how to design and conduct in situ training to promote generalization and maintenance.
The Instruction level of presentation:
Intermediate
Learning Objectives:
At the conclusion of the workshop, participants will be able to: (1) describe in situ assessment and in situ teaching; (2) identify three instructional procedures (i.e., behavioral skills training, simultaneous prompting procedure, and video modelling) for teaching safety skills to children with autism spectrum disorder; (3) develop safety skills instruction plans (including generalization and maintenance of the targeted safety skills) by using the three instructional procedures that will be shared during workshop.
The target audience of presentation:
- Behavior analysts
- Psychologists
- Special education teachers
- Graduate students
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