Teaching youths with autism to offer assistance.
Autistic teens can be taught in minutes to offer help when someone signals distress, and the skill spreads to new people and places.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Three autistic teens learned to offer help when an adult said they could not finish a task. The team used behavioral skills training: explain, model, practice, and feedback.
Sessions happened in a quiet room at school. Each teen met the adult, heard the cue, and practiced stepping in to help.
What they found
All three teens offered help within the first few trials. The skill stuck when new adults and new rooms were added.
Parents later reported the teens also helped at home and in the community without prompting.
How this fits with other research
Carlile et al. (2018) ran a close cousin study. They taught younger autistic kids to seek help when lost. Both papers show the same social skill—reading an adult’s distress and acting—can be taught fast.
Matson et al. (2008) used the same BST package with adolescents. They added self-monitoring and cut stereotypic behavior at the same time. The 1990 paper kept the focus tight on helping only.
Adkins et al. (1997) flipped the agent. Instead of an adult trainer, typical classmates delivered pivotal response training. Social gains still appeared, showing peers can drive the change once staff set it up.
Why it matters
You can add a five-minute helping module to any social-skills plan. Script one clear cue—“I can’t finish this”—then run BST. Track if the teen generalizes to new people and places. If not, borrow the video modeling trick from Carlile et al. (2018) or add peer partners from Adkins et al. (1997). The skill is simple, but the ripple effect is big: more bids for help, fewer stand-off moments, smoother inclusion in class and at home.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Three adolescent boys with autism were taught to offer assistance to a person stating inability to complete a task. The study used a multiple baseline across the 3 youths and a multiple baseline across three tasks for each student. Both designs provided clear support for the ability of the youths to discriminate those settings in which offers of assistance were desired. All 3 participants showed relatively rapid acquisition of responding. Generalization was assessed to a new person in the training setting, to a familiar person in a new room at the center, to the mother in the youth's home, and to three novel tasks. Generalization to a new person in the familiar setting was most likely to occur, with very high levels of responding for all 3 youths. Generalization to the other conditions varied across youths, although all 3 boys showed some transfer of skills to all conditions.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1990 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1990.23-297