Robert Perry Crews (13:32)
And they pretty much would just try to increase social interactions. And they sort of define social interactions as any sort of vocalization directed, you know, among, among the peers. But they're really only taking data on that target peer who was. They were hoping to improve that. That peer social skills, really focusing the areas of requesting, commenting and sharing items as an addendum to the peer mediation of having the peers engage in the different behaviors with the child. Really the focus was on the peers mediating the interaction through the use of the self monitoring procedure. Some of the skills that the peers demonstrated afterwards seems to develop somewhat spontaneously with the goal of either the monitoring, the self monitoring or the peer monitoring of how many requests did the target student make. And then with the peer monitoring, they sort of break them into two groups. So the non disabled peer would also take data on A different non disabled peer. And then one non disabled peer would take data on the target peer just so everyone got a chance to be practicing the peer mediation and then the self monitoring or sorry, the peer monitoring and the self monitoring. Again, if you haven't listened to our episode on self monitoring, you don't know self monitoring. It is basically a self assessment procedure where you compare your behavior to whether it, you know, some behavior of note is or is not happening. And then you do some amount of self recording. And then typically there's some sort of reinforcement, sometimes self reinforcement that you deliver reinforcer to yourself if you meet some sort of a goal. In this case, the peers mediated that and that the peers delivered the reinforcement to the target peer. They had four different groups of students. And I don't always go into this much detail with participants, but I think it's important because when we're talking about social skills and social skill outcomes, certainly prerequisite skills to a study are going to play a big part into things like how easy was generalization, how long did maintenance last, how much were the increase in social skills. Sort of able to mitigate some of the older patterns of kind of not necessarily inappropriate social behaviors, but more atypical social behaviors like perceptive speech echolalia, which some of the participants did engage in. So we had Karen who was in sixth grade. She was in a general education classroom 50% of the day, had an aide supporting her and really liked the idea of hanging out with friends, but often would sort of just engage in this. They just called it silly or inappropriate behavior around them. We had Stuart who according to some of the scores that they were using, scored as having mild to moderate autism symptoms. He was fully included in a 5th grade gen ed class with some para support for about 75% of the day. He did have some challenges with language in that he had some articulation problems. He would engage in some amount of echolalia. He really wasn't initiating very much and wasn't really motivated to play with peers. So very different than Karen in that regard in that he sort of seemed uninterested. However, as we'll see in the results, was that he was uninterested in engaging with peers, really wasn't sure what to do with peers, therefore just didn't engage with them that much. We had Rick, who according to some of their testing scored as having middle or moderate mid to moderate autistic behaviors. He was in a special education classroom in middle school. He was only in gen ed really for lunch and PE and Was mostly engaged in functional academics. He was very interested in peers and engagement with adults. But he only spoke in short sentences. So a lot of his initiations and interactions were considered to be inappropriate. And then finally there was Jason, who scored as having mild to moderate autistic behaviors. He was in gen ed setting, but he had parasport 100% of the time, which we'll come back to bite some of his results in the butt later on. He used two to three word phrases, so short phrases, and often would engage in per se topics. He was also a phasic, which is going to impact his ability to use language fluently. And again, really liked peers, but kind of, we said at the top, tended to initiate more with adults, probably because adults would, you know, either tolerate some of the preservative topics more, more readily or else had more patience when sort of some of his aphasia might come into play in some of the sentences he would make. The peers were nominated by teachers because they were great social peers. The goal here was to just set up the children and in out of a space doing a small group activity. They would play games once, once a day, three times a week. They do this sort of training for 10 minutes, play games for 10 minutes, little social group. The games were things like trouble and topple and kerplunk and uno. But you could also do like. Some of those games are good, Some of those games suck. Koosh throw, Koosh ball throwing. They could do drawing. They can look at magazines together. So a lot of different types of activities for each of the skills, which requesting, commenting and shooting, sharing. They had like a chart that allowed, kind of defined what the behaviors were for the students. And they also had a place on the monitoring sheet, Whether it was peer monitoring or self monitoring, where the students would write down what behavior was the one they were looking for. And then a place to note how many times it did or, well, how many times it did occur. And basically the only conditions where they did some amount of social skills training, Then they added in self monitoring and peer monitoring, it depended what group you were in. Of the four, they sort of counterbalanced it. So two would start with peer monitoring and then flip to self monitoring later and vice versa. They were really just looking for any sort of increase in the skill usage. So as the total number of initiations and social interactions increased, they would, for three sessions, they go back to baseline and then they'd switch to whatever monitoring system that had not been used. So in baseline, they just threw out a bunch of games, Put the Kids in a room and said, here you go, you got to stay here, but you can do whatever you want while you're here. And that was it. Surprisingly, not a lot of interactions from the target peer. Then they trained requesting first. So they did the intervention. They give skill charts to all of the participants in the peers and the target peer. They do training with direct instruction. So they take 10 minutes to define the skill, give examples, ask each student, tell me an example with the non disabled peer sort of switching between the target peer. So everyone had a turn. They would model how to make a request and then ask them again if they didn't have an answer or couldn't give an example of what a request would look like. Then they said, here's a monitoring sheet and pens. And they trained everyone how to do monitoring. Then depending on the group, they either started with self or peer monitoring. For self monitoring, they just write the word on the top requesting and the student. The target student was instructed earlier in that intervention piece to place a check mark every time they request it. They modeled what to do and if the student engaged in the self monitoring behavior throughout, they would get a tangible reward. So they would engage in the requesting if they requested without inappropriate behavior and record it in the right spot that they could earn earn candy for self monitoring. If it were peer monitoring, it was pretty much the same except they would have the peers doing the monitoring. That was, that was pretty much it. They'd practice, practice and then they'd say, great. For the rest of this time, we have 10 minutes. You can play with any of these activities here. And remember to practice requesting and do your monitoring, either peer or self monitoring in the practice session. So those intervention sessions, the trainer delivered any rewards as the participants were engaging in the requesting or commenting or sharing behavior, whatever it was, they'd correct mistakes. They'd do model modeling, they would prompt the skill to start, they'd give praise. But then once they were in the game, it was the non disabled peers who would deliver the rewards to the target students. So if they made a request, they, you know, respond to the request and then they would deliver other reinforcers. So it was typically candy. And then at the end of the time, the non disabled peers would also get candy or stickers just for participating. I don't know how they got through in a public school just giving out candy. I guess it was, hey man, 2001, we had bigger problems to worry about than how much candy kids were getting in public schools.
