Teaching functional community skills to autistic children using nonhandicapped peer tutors.

Two autistic children needed to learn real-world skills like buying snacks or riding the bus.

The researchers first tried showing the steps themselves. The kids did not learn.

Next they trained two non-disabled peers for 20 minutes. The peers then acted as tutors and practiced the skills with the autistic children in the community.

After peer tutoring began, both autistic children quickly performed the skills correctly.

They kept the skills weeks later without extra teaching.

The brief peer-training was the only thing that worked.

Lowe et al. (1995) kept the peer-tutor model but swapped the lesson content. Instead of community skills, peers delivered PRT. Social play and joint attention jumped.

Kourassanis-Velasquez et al. (2019) also used peer BST, adding short video clips. They targeted joint attention and saw gains spread to new peers.

Bassette et al. (2023) moved in a different direction. They dropped peers entirely and taught adolescents self-management for gym workouts. Skills still stuck.

Together the papers show: peers can teach almost anything, but self-management works too when peer help is scarce.

You can unlock community outings without hauling a whole therapy team. Train one or two typical classmates for a few minutes, then send the group to the store or bus stop. The peer tutors keep the session natural and the learner gains a skill that lasts. Try it next week: pick one functional task, script the steps for a peer, and measure correct responses across three trips.