Self-Directed Video Prompting: Promoting Rapidity of Skill Acquisition and Independence across Settings

Background: Achieving independence across a variety of post-school settings is critical for students with ASD. With post-school outcomes of students with ASD being very low compared to peers without disabilities and challenges students with ASD encounter in daily life, the need to examine strategies that contribute to independence in completing vocational, daily living, and functional tasks is important. One strategy that could be a game-changer and could bridge the skills gap is technology. Video prompting (VP) is one such practice that has been found effective in teaching skills to students with ASD. The presentation describes the results of the study that examined the effects of point-of-view VP with least-to-most prompting (LMP) system on the rapidity of students’ vocational skill acquisition. While many studies examined the use of VP in teaching students with ASD, studies that examined the effects of VP on teaching vocational skills were limited. Further this presentation shares the strategy for decreasing the need for extensive job coaching and shifting adult prompting to self-prompting using technology.

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of point-of-view VP with LMP system on the rapidity of skill acquisition of two students with ASD and two students with ID when working on school-based job tasks with process steps that required students to pay attention to the process of task completion rather than the functional step itself.

Methods: A multiple probe across students design of SCRD (Horner & Baer, 1978) was used to identify the effects of a VP and LMP intervention on students’ skill acquisition during a vocational task. Four students with ASD and ID participated in the study. Visual analysis and effect size calculations (Tau-U) were used to analyze data, as is recommended for SCRD data, to determine the existence and magnitude of a causal relation between the intervention and outcome (Kratochwill et al., 2013).

Results: Each of the four students showed significant increases in skill acquisition between the baseline and intervention phases (see Table 1 and Figure 1). The weighted average Tau-U resulted in 1.0, demonstrating a strong effect of the intervention between baseline and both the intervention phase and VP-only phase. The Tau-U effect with 90% confidence intervals was between 0.7695 and 1.

Conclusions: The VP and LMP as a combined intervention is effective in improving vocational skills of students with both ASD and ID. Given the versatility of this method, and the ease with which it can be created and personalized, VP and LMP can be used by educators to teach a variety of skills to students with ASD. Upon skill acquisition, students can use VP as a self-prompting support and fade it as necessary for completion of various tasks without relying on adult prompts. This method can also be used throughout one’s life in a variety of settings due to the versatility and portability of the strategy.