The skill acquisition plan is targeted at teaching a child to ask when he or she wants something. It is a crucial independence skill for kids to learn based on the ability to articulate their needs and desires in a clear, respectful, and appropriate manner.
- Prepare for the learning environment by minimizing all the distractions
- Establishing motivation/ Motivating operation through Stimulus
Motivation emerges when a subject becomes valuable for a child and changes throughout the day. The motivating process is an “antecedent that changes the potency of a consequence” (Tarbox and Tarbox, 2016, p. 65). Establishing an operation increases the potency of a result and evokes the behavior. For instance, if a child has not eaten for few hours, he/she is more likely to ask for food, which becomes a reinforcer in this case. Abolishing operations decrease the potency of the consequence and temporarily suppresses behavior. For example, if a child had a large glass of juice, the juice does not serve as a reinforcer anymore. After a long time, juice or any other drink can serve as a reinforcer within the establishing operation.
Every time a child wants to eat or drink, he or she will ask a parent to give them food or drink. The hunger or thrust serve as a stimulus for a child to start asking for something he/she wants or needs.
- A child has not drunk for hours → a child is thirsty → a child asks for some drink
- A child is engaged in the development game and is struggling with finishing it → a teacher asks whether a child needs some help → a child asks for help and a teacher helps to finish the game.
- Stimulus Control
According to Tarbox and Tarbox (2016), the behavior occurs reliably in the presence of a particular stimulus, when the behavior is enhanced in the presence of an antecedent stimulus and is not enhanced in its absence. For instance, if a father usually gives his child a chocolate bar when his son asks for it, thus reinforcing the behavior of asking, a child will reliably ask for chocolate when the father comes home.
A child is more likely to ask for something in the presence of his father, therefore, developing discrimination stimulus.
- A child is struggling with putting on clothes and starts crying → a teacher says “No cry” and asks whether a child is struggling and needs some help and orders a child to ask → a child asks for help with putting on clothes (a teacher helps only when a child asks for help).
- A child needs help → a child asks for help → a teacher/parent says “thank you for asking for help”
A child has developed the stimulus for asking for help because his teacher/parent thanked him/her for doing so.
- Discriminative stimulus and generalization
It is a stimulus that has control over behavior because it was reliably reinforced in the presence of a particular stimulus in the past (father serves as a discriminative stimulus). Generalization refers to the spreading of the intervention effects to outside of the intervention process.
Reference
Tarbox, J., & Tarbox, C. (2016). Training manual for behavior technicians working with individuals with autism. Academic Press.