The Establishment of Functional Play Behaviors in Children with Autism: Implications for School Inclusion

Abstract

Research on evidence-based methodologies is conducted to expand skills of children with autism. Among the skills, which might be considered important for development, the literature emphasizes functional play. In many children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), the repertoire related to play is impaired and specialized treatment may address the issue by designing individualized procedures based on one-to-one interactions. Discrete trial teaching may help establishing such repertoire in a structured setting and generalization goals must be delineated to increase the likelihood with which the learned skills will emerge in new environments, such as the classroom, the home and other natural contexts. Thus, it is important that skills be shown in places where other people participate. Principles from Educational Psychology are also relevant in the advisory process to professionals related, for example, to school settings in order to favor inclusion of children with ASD to school routine and the relationship with peers. People related to these educational environments should become knowledgeable of evidence-based procedures in order to increase, with their help, generalization of previously established skills in more structured contexts. This paper assessed the efficacy of a structured intervention with functional play activities in three 4-year-old children with autism or suspect. A binder with pictures depicting actions with the components of each of four or two toy sets was used as resource to orient the target-responses of the study. Correct responses, under the control of pictures, produced access to tokens exchangeable for preferred items. Errors were corrected. Errorless performance occurred for all children with responses under the control of pictures for all and generalization with two toy sets for one. The results extended those from the previous literature and, even though the generalization to other environments such as school was not directly measured, the implications of the research to inclusion practices in the school context and development of verbal behavior were discussed.