Prerequisites for teaching perspective taking for children with autism.
I have the recent months been trying out a modified version of McHugh and Barnes-Holmes protocol for teaching the derived relational responding involved in Perspective taking. I have included some task from Weiss (2001), but essentially it´s a translated protocol from these two sources. I have also included some extra prompting-steps in the protocol.
The main challenge I have meet in the implementation of this protocol is to determined what prerequisite skills children need to master before starting this training, as some of the children I believed should master the protocol failed at the start of the protocol. So far it seems that these skills has to be mastered before starting the protocol:
- being able to respond with only social reinforcement
- being able to follow verbal instructions containing three steps
- being able to listen to a story, of at least 5 sentences, and correctly answer questions about the content.
- being able to tact most common objects
- being able to respond according to the relational frames of Coordination, Distinction, Opposition, Comparison and Hierarchy.
I quite convinced there are more prerequisite skills, but I´m still in the progress of determining them.