Increasing handicapped preschoolers' peer social interactions: cross-setting and component analysis.
Peer helpers plus teacher prompts give a fast social boost, but you must keep the prompts active and retrain in every setting.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Fingeret et al. (1985) worked with preschoolers who had developmental delays.
They taught typical classmates to walk up and start play.
Teachers gave quiet reminders and small tokens to the peer helpers.
The team tracked social acts in free-play blocks across classroom areas.
What they found
Social bids and back-and-forth play shot up when peers prompted.
The gains stayed only while teachers kept giving the quiet cues.
When the cues stopped, the play dropped back to baseline.
Skills did not carry to new rooms or new partners on their own.
How this fits with other research
Castells et al. (1979) saw the same quick lift and the same lack of carry-over.
Collier et al. (1986) later dropped the tokens and still got gains that held after prompts ended.
Laermans et al. (2025) now packages peer training so teachers can run Stay-Play-Talk alone.
Their kids keep high play levels even after adults step back.
The line shows a clear upgrade: from constant teacher cues to self-sustaining peer loops.
Why it matters
You can use peer helpers today for an instant jump in social play.
Keep brief teacher prompts in place or the play will fade.
Plan to retrain in each new area or activity.
If you want durable, portable skills, move to newer packages like Stay-Play-Talk that build peer reciprocity from the start.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The purposes of our study were: (a) to train a set of observationally determined social behaviors via peer initiation; (b) to determine if effects generalized across classroom settings and to directly intervene if generalization did not occur; and (c) to analyze components of the peer-initiation intervention. After baseline, nonhandicapped preschool children (confederates) were taught to direct social initiations to the three handicapped preschool-aged students. Teachers prompted the confederates to engage the students in social interaction when necessary and rewarded the confederates with tokens. Confederates' initiations to the students resulted in increased frequencies of positive social interaction. There was no generalization to other classroom settings, and the intervention was subsequently implemented in a second and third classroom. Next, the confederates' token reinforcement system was withdrawn, with no apparent deleterious effects on the confederates' or students' social interactions. When teachers substantially reduced their prompts to the confederates, students' social interactions decreased. Finally, reinstatement of teacher prompts resulted in increases in the confederates' social initiations and, consequently, the positive social interactions of the students.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1985 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1985.18-3