Teaching children with autism to request help with difficult tasks
Mix hard and easy trials while teaching help requests so kids learn when to ask and when to work alone.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Rodriguez et al. (2017) worked with three children with autism.
They wanted the kids to ask for help, but only when they really needed it.
The team mixed easy and hard tasks. They praised and helped when the child asked on a hard task. They ignored asking on easy ones.
What they found
All three kids learned to ask for help only on the hard trials.
They kept the skill with new toys and new tasks.
No child kept begging for help on things they could do alone.
How this fits with other research
Wójcik et al. (2021) used the same mix of need/no-need trials. They taught kids to ask for missing items instead of help. They added short audio scripts and checked three months later. The gains stuck.
Meuret et al. (2001) also used differential reinforcement, but the cue was the adult in the room, not task difficulty. Both studies show kids can learn when not to ask.
Delgado-Lobete et al. (2019) taught longer sentences with text prompts. Rodriguez kept the request short but worked on the when, not the length.
Why it matters
If you only practice “ask for help,” kids may beg on every task. Run both hard and easy trials in the same session. Reinforce asking only when the child truly needs you. This keeps the new skill clean and stops nuisance requests.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We taught three children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder to request help using an interrupted chain procedure during which we manipulated task materials such that the child was either incapable or capable of independently completing a link of a behavior chain. We initially observed undesirable generalization of requests for help during capable trials when teaching was introduced during incapable trials for two participants and to a lesser extent for the third participant. However, with repeated exposure to differential prompting and reinforcement across incapable and capable trials, differential responding was observed across EO-present and EO-absent trials for all three participants during both teaching sets and one generalization set that was never exposed to teaching procedures. These findings suggest that it is important to consider the antecedent conditions under which the response should occur when teaching children to request help.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2017 · doi:10.1002/jaba.420